EXTENDING AMERICAN HEGEMONY

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For more on American exceptionalism and its contemporary manifestations, see Kaplan and Pease Citation1993; Lowe and Lloyd Citation1997. In this volume, we use the term ‘America’ to refer to the United States, fully aware of the geographical and historical fictiveness of the definition. It goes without saying that ‘America’ should refer to the North and South American continents, and that even the North American continent alone should include not only Canada and the United States, but Mexico as well. However, ‘America’ at this point is mostly being used as an ideological and cultural term rather than a geographical or historical term. In public discourse in the United States, ‘America’ is mostly and even exclusively about the cultural myth of exceptionalism. We can easily test this if we consider replacing ‘America’ with ‘United States’ in the following phrases to see if that replacement would work even though, in each context, what is really signified by ‘America’ is obviously the United States and not America as a geographical term: ‘American dream’, ‘America the beautiful’, ‘God Bless America’ and ‘America's Bravest’ (a segment of MSNBC's war coverage that shows a studio wall covered by snapshots of men and women serving in Iraq). ‘The United States dream’, ‘United States the beautiful’, ‘God Bless United States’ and ‘United States’ Bravest’ will not do because ‘America’ cannot be a political term bound by the historical and geographical specificities the way the ‘United States’ is, if it is to retain its idealized aura. In this introduction, we use the term ‘America’ to refer to the United States, recognizing it as a term co-opted by American imperialist ideologies and cultural practices. Recently, we are beginning to witness a body of excellent scholarship produced within postcolonial studies that challenge this aspect of the discipline. The special issue of Interventions edited by Arvind Rajagopal (Citation2004) on the topic of ‘America and its Others’ is a good example. Even in this volume, however, America's explicitly imperial history is not sufficiently recognized; for example, America's irrefutably colonial presence in Asia does not receive enough attention. For in-depth discussions on the possible theoretical and practical dialogues and alliance between American ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, see Campomanes Citation1997; Nguyen and Chen Citation2000. We do not use the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ to refer to American history following the ‘Revolutionary’ War. Given that Native Americans’ struggle for survival and dignity goes on, fiercely yet mostly unrecognized, we believe the use of the term, ‘colonial’ to describe the familial, if anxious, relationship between white settlers in America and its ‘mother country’, and ‘postcolonial’ to describe their separation, is not only inadequate and inept, but politically irresponsible and actually harmful. Even from its very birth, the American empire defined itself as non-imperial. The Second World War solidified and exaggerated the United States’ grandiose image of itself to the level of a Messiah. As the savior of the Jewish victims in Europe and liberator of Asian natives around the Pacific Rim, the United States, at the end of the Second World War, managed to present itself as a benevolent empire by coding its actions as a pursuit of justice and peace, with the final aim of creating a world free to adopt America's nationalized and universalized values of ‘freedom and democracy’. In reality, this particular version of freedom and democracy reads as purchasing power: the freedom to consume and purchase every facet of nature and human life. We believe that Negri and Hardt's (Citation2001) reading of the current global power structure as an empire without imperialism has been unequivocally refuted by the war against Afghanistan, the war against Iraq and the recent overthrow of Aristide in Haiti. As Chalmers Johnson points out, now the whole world is painfully aware that the United States, as the sole global empire, can do ‘anything anywhere anytime’. Johnson (Citation2004: 22) states that, by 2002, ‘the United States no longer had a “foreign policy.” Instead it had a military empire’, and that globalization is over and the era of the United States empire has begun. Intriguingly enough, these seem to be exactly the tactics George W. Bush intends to utilize in his second term in office. His inaugural address proudly claims the national goal for the next four years to be the creation of an ‘ownership society’ where everyone, and by extension, the nation itself, is defined by what he or she owns. Combined with his economic policies intent on exacerbating disparity in resources along the race, class and gender lines, this ownership society will, once and for all, posit white rich males, who own a spectacular amount of riches, as the ideal modern national subject.

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