Home / Books / Cultures of United States Imperialism

Cultures of United States Imperialism

Cultures of United States Imperialism cover image

New Americanists

More about this series

Book

Pages: 680

Published: January 1994

Editors: Amy Kaplan, Donald E. Pease

Contributors: Amy Kaplan, Donald E. Pease, Myra Jehlen, Priscilla Wald, Gauri Viswanathan, Eric Cheyfitz, Bill Brown, Richard Slotkin, Donna J. Haraway, José David Saldívar, Vincente M. Diaz, Christopher P Wilson, Walter Benn Michaels, Kenneth W. Warren, Doris Sommer, Kevin Gaines, Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, Susan Jeffords, Lynda Boose, Mary Yoko Brannen, Frederick Errington

Cultures of United States Imperialism represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the United States.
Drawing on a broad range of interpretive practices, these essays range across American history, from European representations of the New World to the mass media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War. The volume breaks down the boundary between the study of foreign relations and American culture to examine imperialism as an internal process of cultural appropriation and as an external struggle over international power. The contributors explore how the politics of continental and international expansion, conquest, and resistance have shaped the history of American culture just as much as the cultures of those it has dominated. By uncovering the dialectical relationship between American cultures and international relations, this collection demonstrates the necessity of analyzing imperialism as a political or economic process inseparable from the social relations and cultural representations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class at home.

Contributors. Lynda Boose, Mary Yoko Brannen, Bill Brown, William Cain, Eric Cheyfitz, Vicente Diaz, Frederick Errington, Kevin Gaines, Deborah Gewertz, Donna Haraway, Susan Jeffords, Myra Jehlen, Amy Kaplan, Eric Lott, Walter Benn Michaels, Donald E. Pease, Vicente Rafael, Michael Rogin, José David Saldívar, Richard Slotkin, Doris Sommer, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Kenneth Warren, Christopher P. Wilson

Praise

“[T]he collection will prove useful in an American studies context for the variety of perspectives and disciplines which it admits.” - Mark Ellis, The Americas

“In this extraordinary new collection of essays on imperialist discourse and practice in the U.S., editors Kaplan and Pease bring together some of the most provocative, pathbreaking work being done in American literary and cultural studies today. The volume significantly reformulates the terrain of the field by questioning the dominant paradigms of exceptionalism and nationalism which for so long have defined the study of American literature and culture. . . . Together these essays cover immense historical and geographical terrain, employ a wide range of critical methodologies, investigate an impressive spectrum of cultural materials, and practice interdisciplinary cultural studies at its best.” - Michelle Burnham , American Studies

"A superb collection of essays that presents a unique model for a Post-American cultural studies. As a whole, the volume argues persuasively for the centrality of culture in the study of imperialist politics and the defining significance of imperialism in U.S. cultural formations." - Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine

"This collection is well positioned to intervene in the most important scholarly debates of our time." - George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego

Buy

Availability: Out of stock

Price: $42.95

Request a desk or exam copy Spring 2026 Web Sale

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top

Amy Kaplan is Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.

Donald E. Pease is Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities and Professor of English, Dartmouth College.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Introduction
"Left Alone with America": The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture / Amy Kaplan 3
New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism / Donald E. Pease 22
1. Nation-Building as Empire-Building
Why Did the Europeans Cross the Ocean? A Seventeenth-Century Riddle / Myra Jehlen 41
Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation / Priscilla Wald 59
The Naming of Yale College: British Imperialism and American Higher Education / Gauri Viswanathan 85
Savage Law: The Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. M'Intosh and The Pioneers / Eric Cheyfitz 109
Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915 / Bill Brown 129
Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" and the Mythologization of the American Empire / Richard Slotkin 164
II. Borderline Negotiations of Race, Gender, and Nation
White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines / Vicente L. Rafael 185
Black and Blue on San Juan Hill / Amy Kaplan 219
Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936 / Donna Haraway 237
Americo Paredes and Decolonization / Jose David Saldivar 292
Pious Sites: Chamorro Culture Between Spanish Catholicism and American Liberal Individualism / Vicente M. Diaz 312
Plotting the Border: John Reed, Pancho Villa, and Insurgent Mexico / Christopher P. Wilson 340
III. Colonizing Resistance or Resisting Colonization?
Anti-Imperial Americanism / Walter Benn Michaels 365
Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora / Kenneth W. Warren 392
Resisting the Heat: Menchu, Morrison, and Incompetent Readers / Doris Sommer 407
Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as "Civilizing Mission": Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism / Kevin Gaines 433
From Liberalism to Communism: The Political Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois / William E. Cain 456
White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness / Eric Lott 474
IV. Imperial Spectacles
"Make My Day!": Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics [and] The Sequel / Michael Rogin 499
The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism / Susan Jeffords 535
Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War Post-National Spectacles / Donald E. Pease 557
Techno-Muscularity and the "Boy Eternal": From the Quagmire to the Gulf / Lynda Boose 581
"Bwana Mickey": Constructing Cultural Consumption at Tokyo Disneyland / Mary Yoko Brannen 617
We Think, Therefore They Are? On Occidentalizing the World / Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington 635
Index 657
Contributors 669

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-1413-4 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-1400-4 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-7789-4 /

Publicity material