From the Belly of the Beast: Introducing the ‘Reckoning with Empires’ Forum
Note: Beginning with this introductory post titled “From the Belly of the Beast,” T.D. Harper-Shipman launches a forum at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences that she has curated. Titled “Reckoning with Empires,” this forum will run through the following months. Harper-Shipman will bring to our community interviews with “academics and activists who are thinking actively with and against empire from different vantage points.”
“There are those who ask: But where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat--the imported grains of rice, corn, millet--that is imperialism.” --Thomas Sankara [i]
Reckoning with Empires is in the tradition of Black people in Africa and the diaspora who questioned their position within empire. This forum is nestled in a lineage of Third World Women who created the identity to mark their resistance to both internal and external logics of imperialism. The Combahee River Collective, the International Wages for Housework (IWFH), and Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice (WADRJ) are just three examples that come to mind. There were also personal revelations and activism such as June Jordan’s solidarity with women in Chile and Audre Lorde’s writings on the Grenada revolution. I signpost this anti-imperialist tradition because it starkly contrasts a different one—one where Black Americans willingly conscripted into U.S. imperial efforts. The marshaling of Black Americans as missionaries to resettle African lands and civilize indigenous populations had substantial currency in Black American circles in the 18th and early 19th century. Even prominent thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci suggested that Black intellectuals should be sent to Africa to civilize the Africans. From civilizing missions to development, sending Black Americans to Africa as agents for change has morphed from a point of debate to a matter of fact. Black women like Susan Rice, Constance Berry-Newman and Jendayi Frazier are some of the more well-known cogs of US empire in Africa. These women along with other Black American state official, intellectuals, and unfortunately still, missionaries, calls to mind Chandra Mohanty’s provocation that we dispense with essentialized readings of race and gender as inherently imbued with an emancipatory politic.
As a Black American woman, I have not stopped questioning and working to undo my role as an agent of empire since I was in the Peace Corps. My time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso radicalized me. It was where I was first introduced to Thomas Sankara. It was also where I realized first-hand the destructive nature of international development. My race, gender, sexuality, and nationality gave me access to peoples and places far from home under the guise that I would soften the blow from the military arm of U.S. empire. I began to see how seductive but vapid are the fruits of empire. More than a decade later, I stand in a similar position as a Fulbright Scholar. Only this time, I understand the actual assignment.
I hope that this forum serves as a worthwhile addition to the extant conversations on empire and its hydra-form. I build out this forum as a series of conversations. I interview academics and activists who are thinking actively with and against empire from different vantage points. I privilege work that is actionable and sees the ends of empire drawing near. I’m convinced that this is the spirit we must have if we are to truly reckon with the different imperial projects that have the world on the edge of collapse.
In this introductory post, I discuss the very use of the term “empire” among colleagues past and present and, ultimately, how I understand empire.
A Select Literature Review of “Empire”
“Empire” has come in and out of fashion over time, despite how it constitutes and has constituted the modern world order. In many intellectual circles, the word does not even surface. When it does, like many other heavily-used academic concepts, it takes on a nebulous quality—extremely hard to pin down. My own introduction to empire as a conceptual term comes from political economy, namely Marxist, World Systems, and dependency theorists. For many reading and writing in the Marxist tradition, imperialism is a necessary stage in capitalist expansion. Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin explained how the logics internal to capitalism’s need to accumulate require that it finds new territories and new consumers in perpetuity. Early writings on capitalism and empire speak more of empires rather than a singular phenomenon. This is because early permutations of empire took the form of competition between European colonial expeditions. Eric Williams employs fine historical details to demonstrate how metropolises in the UK were financed by British slavery and colonial expeditions in the Caribbean. The subtext to this narrative is how Britain was competing with France, Portugal, and Spain as part of a mercantilist strategy towards reaching the heights of empire. Each country worked to knock the other European countries out of the competition through trade barriers and limiting trade to their own existing archipelago of colonies. European empires preyed on the weakness of their imperial competitors in order to acquire new territories and resources. The Haitian Revolution and Spanish-American War are but two notable examples. The competitive hue of Euro-American conquest gave Euro-American empire its international bellicose form. Land and resources that would turn into wealth were always at the heart of these imperial battles—leftist political economists have made this facet of empire glaringly clear.
Changes in the international architecture after WWI and WWII gave rise to less competition and more collaboration for those European countries still in the running. Some hallmarks of this move towards a consolidated capitalist empire are in fact the Bretton Woods Institutions. A hyper focus on the capitalist component of empire (the private sector actors working to generate profit through exploitation of labor and natural resources) often neglects the state’s ancillary position alongside capitalism in the imperial project. Samir Amin, one of the most prolific writers on global capitalist relations aptly explained, “The capitalist economy does not exist without a ‘state,’ except in the ideological and empty vulgate of liberalism”. Amin also explains how imperialism gains stability through domestic and regional policies. States in the imperial centers can also keep states in the global South from implementing anti-imperial policies. This was the premise of Kwame Nkrumah’s theorizing on empire and its metamorphosis into neocolonialism. Neocolonialism, according to Nkrumah, was the economic control that Europe (and increasingly the U.S.) retained over nominally independent nations. Without control over their resources, former colonizers had defanged the nascent nations, ensuring that all political and social policies continued to facilitate wealth accumulation and consumption demands towards the imperial centers. Writing in the 1960s, Nkrumah was not only indicating the change in imperial structures as a response to anti-colonial and independence struggles; he was also detailing the rise of U.S. empire in Africa.
But what of the cultural forms, the need to win over the hearts and minds of the imperial subjects? Overlooking the cultural facets of empire was considered Nkrumah’s blind spot. Culture, though, was a conveyance of empire. To quote Edward Said, “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future—these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative”(1994, xv).
Before Edward Said, Nkrumah’s African compatriots had already worked out the intrinsic relationship between culture and empire. For Amilcar Cabral, cultural production reflected a people’s relationship with people’s material existence. If colonialism and empire displaced people from their primary mode of existence—land and/or water—their cultural production would be subsequently impacted. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o similarly took culture as a point of oppression and resistance to foreign dominations. Teaching children to mimic and consume the language, clothing, music, art, and food originating in the imperial center and demarcating class difference within the metropole was a function of imperialism, according to Thiog’o. Very close to culture is the intellectual dimension of this project. Academia is the handmaiden to empire. Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji is most instructive for making this point. Hountondji parallels how epistemic extraction in Africa parallels the process of resource extraction. Both take ostensibly raw materials/data from the indigenous to be exported to the imperial centers and returned as finished good/theories/books/ etc. Trying to understand empire without culture and academia would be like trying to understand political science as a discipline without white men—virtually impossible.
At least these scholars and activists made the attempt. And during the 1950s and 1950s, empire was still the order of the day. In Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew defines empire in the interwar period as an unequal incorporation into an international hierarchy ordered around race. But it was also changing quickly and gaining new adherents in the post-WWII years. Not only did the form move from competition to collaboration but also the former imperial order that clung to racial hierarchies gave way to less phenotypical markers and more diffuse racial indicators.
Gone were the days of fierce squabbles among imperial powers to control new territories. Or at least overtly. Euro-American states and corporations learned that they could gain more, exploit more, if they worked together. Samir Amin labeled this permutation, oligopolistic imperialism. The capitalist undercurrent that always moved empire along was now hyper-financial, further concentrated in hands of a few, and more rapacious. With the U.S. at the helm, anyone and everything was expendable.
Trafficking in the same global police rhetoric that the demoted empires once used, the U.S. trampled around the world with so much force, it has taken up considerable space in recent intellectual discussions of empire. While there are never enough stones to throw at the American Goliath, we must reserve some for the new imperial aspirants. The U.S. looms so large on the world stage that its shadow obscures the new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)-imperialism taking shape. There is no other way to understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine with the support of British and U.S. military power since 1948 except as part of a broader imperial project. H.L.T Quan describes how China now uses the language of “South-South” solidarity to exploit natural resources in many African countries. What other theoretical tools do we have to explain Kenya spearheading a UN-mission in Haiti? Mamyrah Douge-Prosper calls this “multicultural recolonization” in Haiti, where South Korean, U.S. American, Haitian multinational corporations and other international actors collaborate to displace Haitian peasants from their land and further exploit their labor in sweatshops. What makes DEI imperialism possible is what made earlier forms of empire feasible, buy-in from citizens in the imperial center.
As I mentioned earlier, the nation-state is indispensable for any imperial project. Not just because of its outward facing policies, but because of how it governs its domestic constituency as well. Oppressive and coercive measures to silence opposition to warmongering and violent overseas policies are the go-to strategies for nation-states (in general) that find dissent from their citizenry. In Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander makes this core to her definition of neo-imperialism or “the extension of the territorial interests of the U.S. national security state through war and militarization, procured both externally and internally” (182). What gets exported with these interests are the rank ordering of social categories (sexuality, race, gender, ability etc.) that validate material difference, premature death, and quality of life.
What is Empire?
The body of scholarship, artistic works, and activism that inform how I understand empire is vast. The works and scholars mentioned here are by no means exhaustive. It is my hope, though, that these works entice readers to delve further into texts that take up the question of imperialism.
Based on this short literature review, I understand imperialism as the political, economic, and cultural efforts to dominate people in other territories to facilitate wealth and resource extraction while attempting to remake those foreign people in the image of the imperial center. Empire relies on acquiesces and consent (either passive or active) from citizens in the center.
We cannot afford to hollow out our understanding of empire. It works only to absolve us any responsibility in assessing our role in its continuation. Not only this but avoiding a discussion of imperialism keeps us from grasping how our own increasing confrontations with a militarized state, rising incarceration rates, projections of scarce resources and their distribution are at the other end of empire.
The worn treads of Euro-American empire are all around us, and we must name it as such. This forum is an attempt to do as much.
-T.D. Harper-Shipman
T.D. Haper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and Africa is a Country. During the 2023-2023 academic year, Harper-Shipman is a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal working on a project titled “Suturing Reproduction and the Nation: the politics of family planning in West Africa.”
[i] Quoted in Brian J. Peterson, Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2021), 242.
