Fifteen years ago, Neil Lazarus argued in The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) that the “urgent” task of postcolonial studies in the 21st century is “to take central cognizance of the unremitting actuality and indeed the intensification of imperialist social relations in the times and spaces of the postcolonial world,” including those times and spaces shaped by the hegemonic power of the post-war United States. This virtual seminar invites papers that consider how postcolonial literatures reckon or do not reckon with the actualities of U.S. imperial power. It further invites papers that consider the affordances and limitations of reading postcolonial literatures through the lens of U.S. empire, as opposed to or in relation to other frameworks such as globalization, the “imperial global rainbow” of Hardt and Negri, or colonial capitalism. 

The seminar is intentionally conceived as broadly comparative, and proposals focusing on any genre or tradition of postcolonial literature are welcome. Conversations may address questions such as: What mechanisms of power and imaginaries of resistance to U.S. empire surface in postcolonial literatures at what historical moments? How does postcolonial literature periodize U.S. empire and vice versa? What are the methods for reading postcolonial literature in relation to the contemporary administrative logics and actual catastrophes of U.S. imperialism? How do we understand the relation between U.S. empire and genre? What are pedagogical techniques for teaching postcolonial literature and U.S. empire? What is the relation between postcolonial literatures and U.S. empire studies, particularly as the latter attend to Indigenous cultural production and U.S. settler colonialism?