Amy Kaplan

Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 3-21.
Kaplan writes, “Cultures of United States Imperialism challenges this still resilient paradigm of American exceptionalism that links the political practice of empire with its academic study…Three salient absences which contribute to this ongoing pattern of denial across several disciplines: the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism” (pg. 11). She continues, “Foregrounding imperialism in the study of American cultures shows how putatively domestic conflicts are not simply contained at home but how they both emerge in response to international struggles and spill over national boundaries to be reenacted, challenged, or transformed” (pg. 16).

Donald E. Pease, “New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 22-37.
Pease writes, “As an ongoing cultural project, U.S. imperialism is thus best understood as a complex and interdependent relationship with hegemonic as well as counterhegemonic modalities of coercion and resistance” (pg. 23). He continues, “Cultures of U.S. Imperialism addresses the relationships between recent changes in the understanding of U.S. diplomatic history and the emergent interest in the importance of imperialism to cultural constructions in general and for critical multiculturalism’s understanding of race, class, and gender as culturally constructed categories specifically” (pg. 26).

Bill Brown, “Science Fiction, the World’s Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 129-163.
Bill Brown writes, “If the inter-imperialist rivalry of World War I was predicated by the world’s unification – the transcendence of spatial barriers effected by travel and communication systems, the emergence of mass culture, and a burgeoning capitalist world-economy – then the very spatial collapse recounted by science fiction makes the [science fiction] novels’ inter-imperialist rivalry and metropolitan interracial conflict appear wholly predictable” (pg. 138). He continues, “We can argue that the genre discursively reproduces the American naturalist and ethnographic spectacles (at world’s fairs and natural history museums) that depended on the modern imperial/metropolitan network as a mode of collection” (pg. 138). Further, “American science fiction, in its moment of modern emergence, attempts to synchronize the modernity of the American imperialist trajectory with an imperialist body from the previous century” (pg. 138).

Vincente L. Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 185-218.
Rafael argues, “The link between benevolence and discipline was constructed through the practice of surveillance” (pg. 187). In this way, “The census functioned as a machine for totalizing observation. Through the collection and classification of statistical data, it kept watch over the population, mapping their social location and transcribing them as discrete objects of information and reformation” (pg. 190).

Walter Benn Michaels, “Anti-Imperial Americanism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 365-391.
Michaels summarizes the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writing, “Although the major anti-imperialist literature of the turn of the century made no mention of the major imperialist adventures of the turn of the century, it did not fail to address the issues raised by those adventures. Rather it understood those issues as having essentially to do with the nature of American self-government and American citizenship” (pg. 366).

Kenneth W. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 392-406.
Summarizing African American literature, Warren writes, “Whether uttered by Du Bois, Garvey, Gramsci, and others, optimism about the possibility of worldwide black leadership tended to assume that this process would proceed, at least for a time, along imperialist lines of power established between the West and Africa” (pg. 399). He continues, “If the placement of Africa under direct control of European nation-states would make possible the capitalist transformation that African blacks, left to themselves, could not bring about, then all Western black elites need insist on was the ultimate right of blacks to rule in the stead of Europeans” (pg. 399).

Kevin Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 433-455.
Gaines writes, “Like the rest of the country, black leadership was divided on the issue of imperialism; while many blacks vigorously denounced the racism and hypocrisy inherent in imperialist ideology, others preferred to view the participation of black soldiers in, for example, the wars in Cuba and the Philippines as proof of the race’s loyalty and patriotism, the recognition of which might overcome domestic race prejudice” (pg. 436).

Donald E. Pease, “Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War: Post-National Spectacles,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 557-580.
Pease writes, “The three proper names in the title designate crucial phases in the epoch of cold war rule and represent different symbolic resolutions of this constitutive instability. Individually and collectively they designate monumental national memories expressive of an ahistorical supranational essence as well as traumatic historic materiality unassimilable to the grand narrative of U.S. history” (pg. 558). Of this narrative and its role after Vietnam, Pease writes, “In American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, John Hellman explained this change as the nation’s loss of its mythological rationale. That mythology which originated with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-stocking Tales retold the story of America’s origination in the savage wilderness and its violent regeneration through its many campaigns against the empire. But Vietnam brought this mythology to a conclusion when, instead of finding themselves able to take possession of their Vietnam experience by projecting this ‘inner romance’ upon it, U.S. combat soldiers entered into a psychic landscape ‘that overwhelmed the American idea of frontier’ as liberated territory” (pg. 570).… (altro)