There is nothing incidental about imperialism. In his foundational 1963 study of U.S. American expansionism, The New Empire, historian Walter LaFeber noted,

First, the United States did not set out on an expansionist path in the late 1890s in a sudden, spur-of-the-moment fashion. The overseas empire that Americans controlled in 1900 was not a break in their history but a natural culmination. Second, Americans neither acquired this empire during a temporary absence of mind nor had the empire been forced upon them.

LaFeber’s articulation of U.S. expansionism underscores its calculated, repetitive, purposeful, and longstanding nature. As a range of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars have aptly demonstrated, some of the ways empire continues is not only through outright invasion, but via army bases located across the world, in places as disparate as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Iraq. Then there is the issue of “overseas departments” or “regions” in the Caribbean Sea, such as Martinique or Guadeloupe that are technically decolonized but not entirely free of French rule. 

There are, moreover, transnational affiliations that make the continued workings of empire possible under the guise of “foreign policy”: the funding of ongoing authoritarian regimes, and of renewed bombings and “forever wars.” While these are primarily examples of US neo-imperialism, vestiges of past empires and the relations of power that were instituted during their long tenures support the endurance of empire in its new forms, including the empires of multinational corporations. This panel seeks to bring together scholars who work on empire in all its iterations throughout history and across different disciplines, so that the workings of different empires (along with the different workings of empires) may be coalesced to create a comparative and collaborative discourse of empire. We hope to generate conversations around the following, non-exhaustive topics related to imperial projects and their literary manifestations:  

• The history and evolution of empire
• Neo-imperialism and the twenty-first century
• Theories of empire
• Hidden empires (Immerwahr)
• Language and empire / languages of empire
• Labor and empire
• Direct and indirect rule
• Nation-building and empire
• Territorial and oceanic empires
• Academic imperialism and the “political economy of knowledge” (Rivera Cusicanqui)
• Tech empires