Empire and Global Economy – Aditi Aggarwal

In this week’s readings, we encounter the intersections between liberalism, imperialism, war, gender, and settler colonialism. In some ways, these works engaging with the reality of war, bring together a number of the methodologies we have been thinking about over the course of the first eight weeks. Mohanty et. al. (2006) discuss how the legitimation for war is intrinsically produced through narratives of women’s liberation, which actively veil the very real and systematic victimization of particularly gendered bodies and women that is the result of war. It examines how war and imperialism abroad work to marginalize gendered bodies of color even within the US. The Feldman and Khalili chapters look at different ways in which US imperialism and settler colonialism reinforce and shape each other to further a heterosexist and racist state project, disguised in ideas of freedom, civility and democracy. The ruse of democracy is maintained as a means to distance the settler colonial state from the effects of its violence by bartering assimilation into the US for consent to US colonial and imperial policies.

            Methodologically I find it useful to pick up on the ways in which the effects of the discursive and political apparatus of foreign policy on domestic conditions are revealed in these works. Further, it highlights how the fusing together of particular identities like Jewish with Zionist, women with liberation can create coalitions of power that perpetuate particular forms of imperialism, even when it might be against the interest of the parties involved.

Questions:

How might this approach work with decolonizing methodologies when looking at new forms of settler colonialism that are produced from the effects of earlier racist, colonial regimes and now perpetuate their policies? Should these phenomena perhaps be studied through different frameworks?

While it is evident that empire persists and is inherently welded to the corporate capitalist economy, how does one address the very real aspirations of people in non-Western contexts for aspiring to positions of power within this political economy in one’s research, without reducing it to ideas of false consciousness?