Antiracism amidst empire? Understanding the United States' relationship to whiteness

Abstract

Dominant conceptualizations of the United States as a nation-state have recently given way to greater understandings of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. However, notions of U.S. empire may still work to naturalize settler colonialism if viewed in isolation from the expansiveness of what has been considered U.S. territory. In this review article, I outline three dominant understandings of U.S. empire and describe how each reifies the myth of the U.S. as a "nation-state." The U.S. does not simply have an empire. It is an empire. I then review helpful insights concerning processes of rule within empire-states including from postcolonial sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and gender and sexuality. Insights from critical Indigenous studies offer a way forward for research that analyzes the rule of settler colonial and empire-states alongside the politics of race and racism. As theorized by Indigenous feminisms in Oceania, racism also operates through possessive processes that integrate peoples and ways of living into state logics and mechanisms of rule. Finally, I argue that sociology committed to addressing racism must further grapple with the reality that the United States is an empire-state. As such, we must more closely analyze the state and statist politics as key producers of White supremacy today.

Citizen, Subject, Human: For A Humanist Sociology at The End of The Eurocene

“…Most anticolonial work within the discipline stems from postcolonial theory’s revisionist humanism rather then from Indigenous movements understandings of the politics of difference (Kumar 2011). Sociologists also have a tendancy to historicize colonization as always either “back then” or “over there” (Nicholls 2022) rather than analyzing the proximate actions of contemporary states as imperial. The dominant dichotomy between nation-states and empire-states remains and serves to erase the colonial practices of past and present governments (Kumar 2010).…”