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Inter-imperiality

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Laura Doyle shows how inter-imperial competition has generated a systemic stratification of gendered, racialized labor, while literary and other arts have helped both to constitute and to challenge this world order.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 9, 2024

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This video video discusses the concept of "inter imperity," a term coined in the author's book that critiques the historical and political dynamics involving multiple empires competing for resources, labor, and power. The author emphasizes understanding empire as an expansionist state exerting control through various means, often involving violence, bureaucracy, and cultural manipulation.

The book analyzes how empires—defined by their differing structures and power dynamics—interact with and influence one another, thereby shaping geopolitical landscapes. The author points out the significance of "shatter zones," or regions repeatedly affected by multiple empires, emphasizing the importance of interpreting these areas not as peripheral but as critical zones of contestation and struggle.

This video video also touches on the roles of gender within these dynamics, articulating how women become pawns in inter-imperial strategies and how their struggles are often overshadowed by larger political conflicts. The author advocates for an interdisciplinary approach that includes the humanities, especially literature and art, as crucial for understanding and critiquing the intersections of empire, labor, and gender.

Finally, the discussion positions the book as a decolonial project aimed at reconstructing historical narratives and promoting awareness of the relational nature of existence shaped by power structures, ultimately seeking to honor the struggles and contributions of those marginalized in traditional histories. This video video concludes with a call to recognize the interconnectedness of human experiences across different contexts and epochs.

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So, inter imperity is a key word I worked

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with, in writing the book Inter Imperity.

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And the subtitle is Buying Empires,

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gendered Labors in the Literary Arts of Alliance.

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Um, and,

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after a lot of research, I came to see

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that, I needed this term in order to direct attention

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to the long, historical

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and political condition of living

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amid not only the invasions and manipulations of one empire,

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but amid the jockeying among several empires.

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Um, so the book offers a critique

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of the long accruing dynamics

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and practices

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through which these jockeying empires in large states have

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competed for resources, labor, power,

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and in turn laid the foundations of in,

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of inequality and violence.

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Today. Um, I'll, I'll add as a, as in terms of a definition

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of empire that, like many others, I understand empire

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as an expansionist state

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that achieves sustained control over the labor and finances

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and administration and material resources of a foreign

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territory through political, financial, and

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or violent coercion,

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often usually involving violent coercion.

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And, this is crucial for me whose powers

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of control the state's powers of control arise

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and develop in relationship to other

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such large states or empires.

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So that last point is essential to my approach to empires.

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Since an empire success

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or failure depends in significant part on its ability

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to control foreign territories, including its ability

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to suppress dissent, it, this determines its ability

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to negotiate geopolitically, for instance,

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with other large states.

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So, so, this emphasis on inter imperial dynamics,

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I also wanna note does not imply

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that all empires have been the same or have equal power

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or have engaged in precisely the same projects

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as people discuss these days.

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There are settler empires

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and there are long distance empires, all kinds

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and shapes and sizes of empires.

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Um, the, you know, when we speak of international relations

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for instance, we don't assume that all nations are the same.

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When we speak of interpersonal relations, we don't assume

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that all the persons are the same.

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Um, on the contrary, this,

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an inter imperial theory begins from the fact

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that different empires of different sizes

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and degrees of power centered in different yet linked

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geographical locations form in dialectical relation.

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So their differences

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and their divergent histories, as well

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as their linkages alliance

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and conflicts shape their co formations.

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Um, so, so the,

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the book

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and the whole idea of interper reality, develops,

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analysis of the way that em empires have

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competed through a range of means.

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Again, not only violence and military power,

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but also through control of language use, cultural forms,

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belief systems, and not least reproductive marriage

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and inheritance laws.

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I'll come back to this a little bit later.

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Um, but the latter codes and practices for marriage

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and reproduction are especially key, of course,

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for the production of the state within racist

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and status hierarchies, which serve

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to be reproduce laboring classes

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and control certain racialized control power.

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Um, so I bring together, you know, history

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and the theories

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and, methods of a lot of disciplines in order

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to develop this, what I think of as a dialectical theory

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of relationality and power draws.

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I'm feminist, economic, materialist, literary,

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and geopolitical thought.

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Um, I will say one more thing about this

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that's very important to emphasize.

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I think about the idea of internality, that,

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the deep time perspective

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and the, staying aware at all times of which empires,

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how many doing what, are involved in any one era.

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Um, what it also brings into clear view is the multifaceted

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struggles of regions and peoples that

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for centuries have lived in.

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What one, scholar of empire calls the shatter zones of,

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of empires, and this includes successive

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and converging colonizations.

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So we can think of the Middle East, Eastern Europe,

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the Andes, the Caribbean, the mare.

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These region regions, I stress need to be understood

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and honored, not as peripheral territories,

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but as strategic inter imperial zones,

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which are repeatedly vied over for their resources,

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including laborers and their geopolitical locations.

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So they might be situated at strategic crossroads

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or along sea lanes,

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but for instance, parts of the Middle East

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and North Africa have been repeatedly invaded

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by empires from the Persian

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and the Macedonian of Alexander the Great through Roman

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and Byzantine, to the Ottoman and the European.

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So each reorganization has left its sediments

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in material ways, in linguistic, philosophical,

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and political forms in these shape future conflicts.

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And that's also important about this, this key term.

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Um, it's really meant to illuminate what's going on now.

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So if we think of, for instance, that the fact that parts

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of Kir have been repeatedly invaded claim

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and shaped by vying states from the Chinese to the British,

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this has in turn influenced the Ving claims on the region

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by, India, Pakistan today.

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Um, similarly Eastern Europe, two millennia

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of successive waves of empires, from the Celtic

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and Roman to Ottoman, Habsburg and Soviet Union.

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These regions continue

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to suffer under inter imperial jockeying for them,

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and this situation evokes deep

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yet different resonances for each.

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Um, the, these regions has develop, have developed then

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as pales of inter imperial history

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and infrastructural accretion.

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They have also been

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and continue to be vessels of layered collective memory

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and vying identifications, ethnic or otherwise.

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The replete with cultural resources

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and seasoned forms of wisdom rise, sense of humor sometimes,

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as well as memories of betrayal

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and violence, which can be then catalyzed

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by events in the present.

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So these long accruing identities, sensibilities, languages,

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and state form formations we could say are the world.

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Um, they carry both sustaining values

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and defensive attachments, including

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to gendered forms of civilization.

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And they compromise the difficult field

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of relations in which we are called on to act.

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They're the kind of world shaping dynamics

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and determinations that I think only an interdisciplinary

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inter imperial and collaboratively built

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method can really capture.

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Um, I can come back.

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I, I would say a word about resistance

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and how activists, have been aware that they are

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situated in the surround of empire, so

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that Roger Caman in Ireland negotiates

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with the German empire

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to win Irish independence from the British

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Tucson Ture negotiating with agents of British, empire

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for arms and support in his struggle against the French

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Empire, in,

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the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire

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during World War I.

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He, Sharif, Hussein Ibin Ali is encouraged

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and abed by the British Empire,

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although be eventually betrayed

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by them in the Belfor declaration with clear effects

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for today's geopolitical crises.

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So, again, well, I could say much more about that.

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There's more in the book.

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Um, but I just wanted to emphasize that inter imperity,

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again, names a condition really of existential being

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in our historically shaped world

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that is shaping the relations both among empires

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and the relations of people who live among those empires.

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Really, the book begins

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and began for me, to some degree

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in trying to think about, you know, how

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how is this all working on the ground?

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Um, and I am a feminist scholar.

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I think I'm always trying to wonder how did we get here,

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in general and, the relationships between men and women.

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Um, so, I'll, I'll just say

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that the, that the whole model really rests on the

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observation, which is a kind of dialectical observation

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that, polities are co-ed in thereafter co formed,

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and so are persons.

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Um, so when it comes to polities, a states claim

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to sovereignty, for instance, has to be recognized

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by other states to have any force.

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Most states, empires, kingdoms, villages depend

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for another point on trade.

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This is a relational activity.

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Even an embargo expresses a negative relation.

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So neither persons

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nor polities have an original apriori independence in my

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sense of things to revive or defend.

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Um, there's fr fraught co origination across the board

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that involves labor in all situations.

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Um, I can say more about dialectics.

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Uh, there have been many traditions, of course, Chinese,

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Greek, et cetera.

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Hagel was reading both of these.

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Um, and the emphasis there in across traditions in different

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ways is that

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there is a co constitution of phenomenon.

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The relations among phenomenon are

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what create the world we live in.

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Um, so I will go back to Hagel

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and just, note that his famous Lord

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and bondsman scene, is, comes late

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to history, we could say.

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Um, so, when Hagel positions the Lord

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and the bondsman as, physical contest for control

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as the original intersubjective moment, the,

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there's a whole lot erased, right away

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for his life or death.

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Story of labor has no women in it yet, of course,

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without women's labors, there'd be neither lord

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nor bondsman in the first place.

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That is, we would get further, if we recall,

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as so few philosophies do

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that a person's physical survival depends from birth

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on another person who brings sustenance

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from the material world.

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So to begin to craft a sound dialectical theory

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grounded in historical conditions, requires

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that we track the co formations of gender

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and labor at the center of a long history

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of interacting political economies.

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Um, so to focus on the existential

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and historical condition of re relationality in these terms

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is not deposit an originary scene parallel to hagels

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of innocent mother and child

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relationality is not simply bene benevolent,

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it's demanding on all sides.

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Um, this condition rests on a foundational practice

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of nourishing, harboring, protecting,

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but these can be enacted among a whole range

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of other acts from stinging blows to comforting, embraces to

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vacillations between them.

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Um, so, so this relationality I'm talking about is volatile,

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troubled, pressured by the politics of the surround.

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When we revisit women's conditions within the framework

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of interim parality, we see more clearly

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that their struggles issue not merely from their positions

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between men to Echo Eve Sedgwick's book title,

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nor merely from their positions between colonizing

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and colonized men,

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as many a feminist post-colonial thinker has observed,

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but as their, from their status as pawns in a whole terrain

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of men jockeying in

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and among empires who tactically moved

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by capture women on their chess boards,

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even at times in the service of anti-colonialism.

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So in this position, often resisting

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or negotiating with this position, women have been cast

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as a dangerously uncertain element in the field of relations

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and achilles heel in men's control of states.

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So we might recall in this context that some

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of the most well-known stories of the world blame women

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for the downfall of either the powerful state

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or for the colonization of an invaded community.

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We can think of Cleopatra, Helen

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and Troy, Helen of Troy, blamed for the ruin of empires,

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or in anticolonial narratives.

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Women are blamed for letting in the conquerors as

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with the figure of malanca in the Mexican tradition,

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or to, to, take Joyce

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as our mocking guide,

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the adulterous who's blamed a Nat Irish nationalist rec,

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rhetoric for bringing the Saxon robbers here.

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Um, so the familiarity of these gendered narratives

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of micropolitics return us to the structural importance also

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of art and literature for indicates

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that inter imperial legacies occupy the habit habitats over

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a long historical time,

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not only spatially though in segregated spaces

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and ing hierarchizing systems,

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but also psychically in art memory and feeling.

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These invisible occupations are part of

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what we can tease out into view

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through studying literatures and art.

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Um, literary

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and other arts have cultivated their audience,

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critical imaginaries, even as they have also

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been forces of hegemony.

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So literature is the site I focus on as a critical place

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of contestation among these different forces.

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Um, and so I'll just make

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that nod toward interdisciplinarity there.

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I think, you know, again, I'm a literary scholar, so,

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and, and of course, speaking institutionally,

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in the poor, the poorer college

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of the humanities and the fine arts.

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Um, and, so in part the book, in the book,

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I'm making a case for the importance of humanities knowledge

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and awareness of arts to any good theory, let's just say,

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of world politics.

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Um, and so, you know,

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I'll speak again of all the humanities,

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but with an eye to literature,

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these disciplines have generated methods

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and knowledge that are essential for a deep critique,

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to understand hegemony

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and resistance, geopolitical economy, infrastructure,

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extraction, projects, labor.

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We need to incorporate some skilled analysis of culture,

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art, philosophy, and languages.

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I see them as, part of the dialectic

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structuring forces not add-ons, not, superstructure.

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Um, so literature

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and literary histories has generated mediating forms

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of control and struggle, a site of dialectical con

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confrontation and a force in the world.

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I mean, think about the difference that movies make, that,

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that, novels have made,

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that people have made these points for a long time.

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They carry epistemologies, they carry language histories,

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they connect people to history,

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and, they can provoke, resistance themselves.

15:55.905 --> 15:59.565
You know, again, take, the, the diversifying

16:00.265 --> 16:03.285
of the literary curriculum or other arts curriculum

16:03.285 --> 16:07.125
and the, the ways that the people that,

16:07.605 --> 16:09.565
literature is misrepresenting have come and,

16:09.585 --> 16:12.485
and changed that, that has had an impact on students.

16:12.825 --> 16:17.805
Um, so, I wanna also note that, partly,

16:18.225 --> 16:22.005
the, the, the time to do interdisciplinary work is

16:22.105 --> 16:23.525
of course, part of the problem.

16:24.185 --> 16:26.565
Um, and the ways that our institutions are

16:26.925 --> 16:28.365
structured into disciplines.

16:29.025 --> 16:32.485
Um, so there's, it takes time, it takes effort,

16:32.545 --> 16:33.765
it takes a lot of struggle

16:33.825 --> 16:36.005
and building of trust to understand each other

16:36.105 --> 16:37.445
and what languages we're speaking.

16:37.605 --> 16:38.965
I know from experience,

16:39.425 --> 16:40.445
and I'll mention here,

16:40.545 --> 16:43.725
the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project,

16:43.725 --> 16:46.805
that I have co-directed with an economist from Kenya

16:47.865 --> 16:49.005
Ji for about 10 years.

16:49.785 --> 16:51.965
And we've been working on this problem

16:52.025 --> 16:53.365
of bringing people together.

16:53.985 --> 16:57.045
Um, and we have just

16:57.045 --> 16:59.685
after 10 years, put together a three volume

17:00.265 --> 17:03.365
edited collection called Decolonial Re Constellations,

17:03.865 --> 17:05.205
but that took two grants

17:05.905 --> 17:08.645
and some really good, administrators

17:08.665 --> 17:10.725
who understood the importance of this.

17:10.905 --> 17:13.645
And I'll just, say that one of our first efforts

17:13.665 --> 17:16.365
to raise some money to bring people from different regions

17:16.365 --> 17:17.765
and periods into the room

17:17.865 --> 17:22.125
and talk really, we owe a debt

17:22.185 --> 17:26.365
to an administrator at UMass Mike Malone, who, when he said

17:26.365 --> 17:27.605
to us, what is your product?

17:27.945 --> 17:30.405
10 years ago, when we were trying

17:30.405 --> 17:32.245
to put together a conference, we said,

17:32.585 --> 17:35.525
the conversation right now is the product we're so far

17:35.875 --> 17:39.765
with people working on medieval and postmodern

17:39.945 --> 17:42.165
and in Kenya, in Swahili,

17:42.425 --> 17:43.645
or in other places,

17:43.785 --> 17:46.285
in other languages, we're just beginning.

17:46.505 --> 17:48.885
So you have to have that kind of,

17:49.595 --> 17:51.285
support from institutions.

17:51.665 --> 17:54.765
And I wanna end by just saying ask.

17:55.025 --> 17:57.685
My mother always taught me have a question ask.

17:58.385 --> 18:00.845
So we took the risk of saying that

18:00.865 --> 18:01.925
that's, that's the product.

18:02.225 --> 18:04.325
Um, that's the conversation for a start.

18:04.745 --> 18:07.365
And so sometimes you get, you get a yes.

18:07.665 --> 18:12.125
Um, so I, I'm a, I'm an advocate of institutional activism,

18:12.295 --> 18:15.205
which is sometimes just asking instead

18:15.205 --> 18:16.805
of complaining that you don't get.

18:17.065 --> 18:20.525
Um, so, you know, sometimes the magic works,

18:20.555 --> 18:21.645
sometimes it doesn't.

18:22.045 --> 18:26.565
I would say the book is decolonial for sure, fundamentally.

18:27.065 --> 18:31.125
Um, so it's decolonial, I think in a couple of ways.

18:31.665 --> 18:36.405
Um, perhaps most fundamentally it is

18:36.715 --> 18:39.725
fashioned as a project for decolonizing the mind.

18:40.425 --> 18:43.485
Um, and that includes, you know,

18:43.585 --> 18:48.165
not working always within Eurocentric, traditions

18:48.165 --> 18:52.165
of thought, Eurocentric maps of the world, Europe

18:52.465 --> 18:54.045
as the beginning of the modern.

18:54.465 --> 18:56.725
Um, so there's all of that.

18:57.065 --> 19:00.165
Um, it's also, fashioned

19:00.165 --> 19:02.885
as decolonizing mine in the initial sense is developed

19:02.885 --> 19:05.085
by thinkers like NGO

19:05.185 --> 19:09.445
and Linda Wig Smith, who,

19:09.655 --> 19:10.765
wrote really some

19:10.765 --> 19:14.005
of the first books then more recently come, the,

19:14.005 --> 19:16.445
Latin American theorists have talked about modernity

19:16.465 --> 19:17.565
and decoloniality.

19:18.105 --> 19:22.485
Um, this book is working with all of these things,

19:22.985 --> 19:24.645
by retelling

19:25.025 --> 19:29.365
and, you know, one retelling of the history of,

19:29.955 --> 19:34.005
political economy, adding an intersectionality to it

19:34.505 --> 19:38.525
and bringing in histories that, you know, most paradigms,

19:38.525 --> 19:40.565
even among many post-colonial thinkers

19:41.065 --> 19:42.125
or Marxist thinkers,

19:42.745 --> 19:44.965
do not really look seriously at the history

19:44.965 --> 19:46.525
before the rise of Europe to try

19:46.525 --> 19:48.285
to understand the longer struggles.

19:48.865 --> 19:51.245
Um, so it's feminist and decolonial.

19:51.625 --> 19:56.165
Um, and it's looking at, you know, the p micropolitics

19:56.165 --> 20:00.325
of intimacy through the macropolitics of states as one,

20:00.325 --> 20:03.645
critic of Caribbean studies discusses Donut Francis.

20:04.265 --> 20:07.605
Um, I'll also add that recently some,

20:07.605 --> 20:11.285
scholars have been distinguishing post-colonial from

20:11.315 --> 20:13.245
de-colonial, from anti-colonial.

20:13.345 --> 20:15.125
And there's a lot of discussion about this.

20:15.505 --> 20:19.405
Um, like my cohort in the inter,

20:19.405 --> 20:22.285
world Studies interdisciplinary project, we're,

20:22.385 --> 20:24.405
we think these things are connected at the root,

20:24.615 --> 20:25.725
these practices,

20:26.105 --> 20:31.085
and we worry about divisions between these,

20:31.315 --> 20:33.925
that really repeat some of, sometimes some

20:33.925 --> 20:36.205
of the competition that the states have,

20:36.275 --> 20:37.765
also for everyone.

20:38.225 --> 20:41.405
Um, so, it's post-colonial

20:42.025 --> 20:43.245
in the ways people think about

20:43.245 --> 20:47.845
that is focusing on deconstructing empire and colonialism.

20:48.355 --> 20:51.365
It's decolonial in that it's trying to get outside of some

20:51.365 --> 20:55.245
of the Eurocentric epistemologies and methods,

20:55.745 --> 20:58.845
and it's intersectional by keeping gender at the core

20:58.945 --> 21:00.765
of questions about political economy.

21:01.025 --> 21:03.565
So we, I I think of it as decolonial

21:03.825 --> 21:08.045
and post-colonialism, both of them intersectional the book,

21:08.885 --> 21:13.485
I guess, like most things people do really, grows out

21:13.485 --> 21:15.725
of my, my childhood experience.

21:16.065 --> 21:17.805
Um, short version, I promise.

21:18.105 --> 21:21.365
Uh, and that is that I grew up on the south side

21:21.365 --> 21:23.485
of Chicago, near the railroad tracks,

21:23.855 --> 21:26.685
white people on one side, black people on the other side,

21:27.295 --> 21:28.565
blood on the tracks.

21:28.945 --> 21:33.405
Um, and so I was always trying

21:33.405 --> 21:37.565
to un just to understand that, where did this start?

21:37.675 --> 21:41.555
This makes no sense, you know, the, yeah,

21:41.895 --> 21:43.835
so I'll just leave that at that.

21:44.135 --> 21:47.315
Um, so in one sense, all of my books have started there.

21:47.415 --> 21:49.715
The, the first one called Bordering on the Body,

21:49.735 --> 21:51.395
the Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction

21:51.415 --> 21:55.755
and Culture, which is a transatlantic study of, of,

21:56.335 --> 22:00.155
mother figures and the, their role, their pivotal sort

22:00.155 --> 22:03.795
of structural role in, in, in literature

22:04.095 --> 22:05.675
as they are racialized.

22:06.655 --> 22:09.915
So to the next book, freedom's Empire, which again,

22:10.145 --> 22:12.835
focuses on race in the Atlantic world and the freedom

22:13.095 --> 22:14.275
or enslavement story

22:14.345 --> 22:16.115
that has structured the novel in many ways.

22:16.455 --> 22:19.435
So, so this book, then

22:19.825 --> 22:22.435
what happened was I kept going further back in history

22:22.775 --> 22:27.355
and, in this book I found myself reading,

22:27.605 --> 22:30.955
about, you know, the all kinds of literature

22:30.955 --> 22:34.315
that was clearly borrowing forms from literature from the

22:34.315 --> 22:35.355
south and east,

22:36.085 --> 22:39.615
whether it's the Arabian or something else.

22:40.155 --> 22:41.375
So,

22:42.535 --> 22:46.595
and I was also, the book also grew out of my frustration

22:46.945 --> 22:50.875
with the, you know, sort of

22:51.715 --> 22:55.515
immunization or dismissal of the role that

22:56.155 --> 22:58.915
literature has played and the nature of literary study.

22:59.495 --> 23:02.315
And I wanted to make a case for that as part

23:02.315 --> 23:05.115
and parcel of all of this structural analysis

23:05.115 --> 23:08.035
of political economy, critical ones.

23:08.455 --> 23:13.355
Um, yeah, I think, I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

23:13.835 --> 23:18.555
I wonder if you would allow me to read from the book,

23:18.735 --> 23:20.875
in answer to that question of

23:21.145 --> 23:23.315
what I want readers to take from it.

23:23.655 --> 23:28.035
Um, so I hope this won't take too long,

23:28.295 --> 23:30.435
but get some light on the matter.

23:30.815 --> 23:33.835
Um, so,

23:33.985 --> 23:35.955
I'll part read in part paraphrase.

23:36.215 --> 23:40.155
Um, so Inter Imperity seeks

23:40.155 --> 23:43.355
to echo the relational call, the call

23:43.415 --> 23:44.635
to honor the struggles

23:45.345 --> 23:48.325
And the sustaining practices that often escape the frames

23:48.325 --> 23:49.885
of history and theory.

23:50.665 --> 23:55.485
Um, it's, it's this effort to join the project of repairing,

23:55.785 --> 23:58.725
and reintegrating the worlds that Andros centric

23:58.785 --> 24:00.845
and imperial history have put us under.

24:01.505 --> 24:06.045
Um, and it seems to me that the better we understand

24:06.065 --> 24:08.965
how we got here together over a very long DeRay,

24:09.625 --> 24:13.885
the more we can undo our habitual denial

24:14.145 --> 24:17.005
of our radically relational condition.

24:17.385 --> 24:19.405
Um, and,

24:22.075 --> 24:25.855
that's from a, the end of a chapter earlier in the book.

24:26.195 --> 24:29.975
Um, and this is from the very last page of the book.

24:30.275 --> 24:35.255
Um, so I make reference, first of all to,

24:35.715 --> 24:38.655
u's novel, the river between,

24:38.795 --> 24:40.575
and he talks about two mountain ranges.

24:40.875 --> 24:44.295
I'm, I suggest that this is about buying empires,

24:44.355 --> 24:46.935
and there's a, there's a, there's a conflict at the center,

24:47.435 --> 24:50.935
that follows from a woman who dies after her.

24:51.315 --> 24:54.555
Um,

24:56.535 --> 24:59.715
you know, the, the, she has her female circumcision,

24:59.935 --> 25:01.915
and that sets up a whole set of things.

25:01.975 --> 25:06.835
So again, women's reproductivity or not, pleasure

25:06.855 --> 25:10.555
or not, he does place at the heart of that novel.

25:10.975 --> 25:13.675
Um, so I'll just read a little bit.

25:13.975 --> 25:16.705
Um, and so in this valley,

25:17.975 --> 25:20.195
the young inhabitants must learn the truth

25:20.705 --> 25:24.675
that is also echoed in Chang Ray Lee's novel native speaker

25:25.065 --> 25:28.435
that quote, over the mountains, there are mountains.

25:30.505 --> 25:32.265
I ask why struggle to endure?

25:32.725 --> 25:36.945
Um, and we might echo here, Alejo carpenter's

25:37.785 --> 25:39.745
question, in the kingdom of this world,

25:39.885 --> 25:41.145
why struggle to endure?

25:42.035 --> 25:43.935
And I, my answer is,

25:44.005 --> 25:47.015
because the world of water, sun, earth,

25:47.155 --> 25:48.375
and creaturely life

25:48.645 --> 25:51.735
that sustains us also calls us into

25:52.015 --> 25:53.795
relation, barely choosing.

25:54.175 --> 25:58.405
We respond because someone gave birth to each of us,

25:58.825 --> 26:02.615
and someone labored hard to keep us alive,

26:03.125 --> 26:05.755
however, imperfectly, because

26:06.355 --> 26:08.115
although as the enslaved Paul d

26:08.115 --> 26:11.995
and Toni Morrison's beloved knows Miss Doves sunlight,

26:12.095 --> 26:15.475
copper, dirt, moon, everything belonged

26:15.495 --> 26:16.795
to the men with the guns.

26:17.855 --> 26:21.635
We nonetheless find ourselves listening to the doves.

26:22.765 --> 26:24.745
The river runs between the mountains.

26:25.605 --> 26:28.705
It calls us back from betrayals and disavows.

26:29.285 --> 26:33.125
It carries care and cure, it reflects relations.

26:33.585 --> 26:37.115
It thickens us to aow and sustain them.

00:00 - So, inter imperity is a key word I worked with, in writing the book Inter Imperity. And the subtitle is Buying Empires, gendered Labors in the Literary Arts of Alliance. and, after a lot of research, I came to see

00:22 - that, I needed this term in order to direct attention to the long, historical and political condition of living amid not only the invasions and manipulations of one empire, but amid the jockeying among several empires. so the book offers a critique of the long accruing dynamics and practices through which these jockeying empires in large states have competed for resources, labor, power,

00:51 - and in turn laid the foundations of in, of inequality and violence. Today. I'll, I'll add as a, as in terms of a definition of empire that, like many others, I understand empire as an expansionist state that achieves sustained control over the labor and finances and administration and material resources of a foreign territory through political, financial, and or violent coercion, often usually involving violent coercion.

01:22 - And, this is crucial for me whose powers of control the state's powers of control arise and develop in relationship to other such large states or empires. So that last point is essential to my approach to empires. Since an empire success or failure depends in significant part on its ability to control foreign territories, including its ability to suppress dissent, it, this determines its ability to negotiate geopolitically, for instance,

01:54 - with other large states. So, so, this emphasis on inter imperial dynamics, I also wanna note does not imply that all empires have been the same or have equal power or have engaged in precisely the same projects as people discuss these days. There are settler empires and there are long distance empires, all kinds and shapes and sizes of empires. the, you know, when we speak of international relations

02:22 - for instance, we don't assume that all nations are the same. When we speak of interpersonal relations, we don't assume that all the persons are the same. on the contrary, this, an inter imperial theory begins from the fact that different empires of different sizes and degrees of power centered in different yet linked geographical locations form in dialectical relation. So their differences and their divergent histories, as well

02:50 - as their linkages alliance and conflicts shape their co formations. so, so the, the book and the whole idea of interper reality, develops, analysis of the way that em empires have competed through a range of means. Again, not only violence and military power, but also through control of language use, cultural forms, belief systems, and not least reproductive marriage

03:19 - and inheritance laws. I'll come back to this a little bit later. but the latter codes and practices for marriage and reproduction are especially key, of course, for the production of the state within racist and status hierarchies, which serve to be reproduce laboring classes and control certain racialized control power. so I bring together, you know, history and the theories

03:45 - and, methods of a lot of disciplines in order to develop this, what I think of as a dialectical theory of relationality and power draws. I'm feminist, economic, materialist, literary, and geopolitical thought. I will say one more thing about this that's very important to emphasize. I think about the idea of internality, that, the deep time perspective and the, staying aware at all times of which empires,

04:15 - how many doing what, are involved in any one era. what it also brings into clear view is the multifaceted struggles of regions and peoples that for centuries have lived in. What one, scholar of empire calls the shatter zones of, of empires, and this includes successive and converging colonizations. So we can think of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Andes, the Caribbean, the mare. These region regions, I stress need to be understood

04:46 - and honored, not as peripheral territories, but as strategic inter imperial zones, which are repeatedly vied over for their resources, including laborers and their geopolitical locations. So they might be situated at strategic crossroads or along sea lanes, but for instance, parts of the Middle East and North Africa have been repeatedly invaded by empires from the Persian and the Macedonian of Alexander the Great through Roman

05:13 - and Byzantine, to the Ottoman and the European. So each reorganization has left its sediments in material ways, in linguistic, philosophical, and political forms in these shape future conflicts. And that's also important about this, this key term. it's really meant to illuminate what's going on now. So if we think of, for instance, that the fact that parts of Kir have been repeatedly invaded claim and shaped by vying states from the Chinese to the British, this has in turn influenced the Ving claims on the region

05:50 - by, India, Pakistan today. similarly Eastern Europe, two millennia of successive waves of empires, from the Celtic and Roman to Ottoman, Habsburg and Soviet Union. These regions continue to suffer under inter imperial jockeying for them, and this situation evokes deep yet different resonances for each. the, these regions has develop, have developed then as pales of inter imperial history

06:20 - and infrastructural accretion. They have also been and continue to be vessels of layered collective memory and vying identifications, ethnic or otherwise. The replete with cultural resources and seasoned forms of wisdom rise, sense of humor sometimes, as well as memories of betrayal and violence, which can be then catalyzed by events in the present. So these long accruing identities, sensibilities, languages,

06:46 - and state form formations we could say are the world. they carry both sustaining values and defensive attachments, including to gendered forms of civilization. And they compromise the difficult field of relations in which we are called on to act. They're the kind of world shaping dynamics and determinations that I think only an interdisciplinary inter imperial and collaboratively built method can really capture.

07:14 - I can come back. I, I would say a word about resistance and how activists, have been aware that they are situated in the surround of empire, so that Roger Caman in Ireland negotiates with the German empire to win Irish independence from the British Tucson Ture negotiating with agents of British, empire for arms and support in his struggle against the French Empire, in,

07:41 - the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He, Sharif, Hussein Ibin Ali is encouraged and abed by the British Empire, although be eventually betrayed by them in the Belfor declaration with clear effects for today's geopolitical crises. So, again, well, I could say much more about that. There's more in the book. but I just wanted to emphasize that inter imperity,

08:08 - again, names a condition really of existential being in our historically shaped world that is shaping the relations both among empires and the relations of people who live among those empires. Really, the book begins and began for me, to some degree in trying to think about, you know, how how is this all working on the ground? and I am a feminist scholar. I think I'm always trying to wonder how did we get here,

08:38 - in general and, the relationships between men and women. so, I'll, I'll just say that the, that the whole model really rests on the observation, which is a kind of dialectical observation that, polities are co-ed in thereafter co formed, and so are persons. so when it comes to polities, a states claim to sovereignty, for instance, has to be recognized by other states to have any force. Most states, empires, kingdoms, villages depend

09:13 - for another point on trade. This is a relational activity. Even an embargo expresses a negative relation. So neither persons nor polities have an original apriori independence in my sense of things to revive or defend. there's fr fraught co origination across the board that involves labor in all situations. I can say more about dialectics. there have been many traditions, of course, Chinese,

09:46 - Greek, et cetera. Hagel was reading both of these. and the emphasis there in across traditions in different ways is that there is a co constitution of phenomenon. The relations among phenomenon are what create the world we live in. so I will go back to Hagel and just, note that his famous Lord and bondsman scene, is, comes late

10:15 - to history, we could say. so, when Hagel positions the Lord and the bondsman as, physical contest for control as the original intersubjective moment, the, there's a whole lot erased, right away for his life or death. Story of labor has no women in it yet, of course, without women's labors, there'd be neither lord nor bondsman in the first place. That is, we would get further, if we recall,

10:48 - as so few philosophies do that a person's physical survival depends from birth on another person who brings sustenance from the material world. So to begin to craft a sound dialectical theory grounded in historical conditions, requires that we track the co formations of gender and labor at the center of a long history of interacting political economies. so to focus on the existential

11:18 - and historical condition of re relationality in these terms is not deposit an originary scene parallel to hagels of innocent mother and child relationality is not simply bene benevolent, it's demanding on all sides. this condition rests on a foundational practice of nourishing, harboring, protecting, but these can be enacted among a whole range of other acts from stinging blows to comforting, embraces to vacillations between them.

11:50 - so, so this relationality I'm talking about is volatile, troubled, pressured by the politics of the surround. When we revisit women's conditions within the framework of interim parality, we see more clearly that their struggles issue not merely from their positions between men to Echo Eve Sedgwick's book title, nor merely from their positions between colonizing and colonized men, as many a feminist post-colonial thinker has observed, but as their, from their status as pawns in a whole terrain

12:22 - of men jockeying in and among empires who tactically moved by capture women on their chess boards, even at times in the service of anti-colonialism. So in this position, often resisting or negotiating with this position, women have been cast as a dangerously uncertain element in the field of relations and achilles heel in men's control of states. So we might recall in this context that some of the most well-known stories of the world blame women

12:51 - for the downfall of either the powerful state or for the colonization of an invaded community. We can think of Cleopatra, Helen and Troy, Helen of Troy, blamed for the ruin of empires, or in anticolonial narratives. Women are blamed for letting in the conquerors as with the figure of malanca in the Mexican tradition, or to, to, take Joyce as our mocking guide, the adulterous who's blamed a Nat Irish nationalist rec,

13:19 - rhetoric for bringing the Saxon robbers here. so the familiarity of these gendered narratives of micropolitics return us to the structural importance also of art and literature for indicates that inter imperial legacies occupy the habit habitats over a long historical time, not only spatially though in segregated spaces and ing hierarchizing systems, but also psychically in art memory and feeling. These invisible occupations are part of

13:53 - what we can tease out into view through studying literatures and art. literary and other arts have cultivated their audience, critical imaginaries, even as they have also been forces of hegemony. So literature is the site I focus on as a critical place of contestation among these different forces. and so I'll just make that nod toward interdisciplinarity there.

14:20 - I think, you know, again, I'm a literary scholar, so, and, and of course, speaking institutionally, in the poor, the poorer college of the humanities and the fine arts. and, so in part the book, in the book, I'm making a case for the importance of humanities knowledge and awareness of arts to any good theory, let's just say, of world politics. and so, you know, I'll speak again of all the humanities,

14:55 - but with an eye to literature, these disciplines have generated methods and knowledge that are essential for a deep critique, to understand hegemony and resistance, geopolitical economy, infrastructure, extraction, projects, labor. We need to incorporate some skilled analysis of culture, art, philosophy, and languages. I see them as, part of the dialectic structuring forces not add-ons, not, superstructure.

15:26 - so literature and literary histories has generated mediating forms of control and struggle, a site of dialectical con confrontation and a force in the world. I mean, think about the difference that movies make, that, that, novels have made, that people have made these points for a long time. They carry epistemologies, they carry language histories, they connect people to history, and, they can provoke, resistance themselves.

15:55 - You know, again, take, the, the diversifying of the literary curriculum or other arts curriculum and the, the ways that the people that, literature is misrepresenting have come and, and changed that, that has had an impact on students. so, I wanna also note that, partly, the, the, the time to do interdisciplinary work is of course, part of the problem. and the ways that our institutions are structured into disciplines.

16:29 - so there's, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes a lot of struggle and building of trust to understand each other and what languages we're speaking. I know from experience, and I'll mention here, the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, that I have co-directed with an economist from Kenya Ji for about 10 years. And we've been working on this problem

16:52 - of bringing people together. and we have just after 10 years, put together a three volume edited collection called Decolonial Re Constellations, but that took two grants and some really good, administrators who understood the importance of this. And I'll just, say that one of our first efforts to raise some money to bring people from different regions and periods into the room

17:17 - and talk really, we owe a debt to an administrator at UMass Mike Malone, who, when he said to us, what is your product? 10 years ago, when we were trying to put together a conference, we said, the conversation right now is the product we're so far with people working on medieval and postmodern and in Kenya, in Swahili, or in other places, in other languages, we're just beginning.

17:46 - So you have to have that kind of, support from institutions. And I wanna end by just saying ask. My mother always taught me have a question ask. So we took the risk of saying that that's, that's the product. that's the conversation for a start. And so sometimes you get, you get a yes. so I, I'm a, I'm an advocate of institutional activism, which is sometimes just asking instead

18:15 - of complaining that you don't get. so, you know, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. I would say the book is decolonial for sure, fundamentally. so it's decolonial, I think in a couple of ways. perhaps most fundamentally it is fashioned as a project for decolonizing the mind. and that includes, you know, not working always within Eurocentric, traditions of thought, Eurocentric maps of the world, Europe

18:52 - as the beginning of the modern. so there's all of that. it's also, fashioned as decolonizing mine in the initial sense is developed by thinkers like NGO and Linda Wig Smith, who, wrote really some of the first books then more recently come, the, Latin American theorists have talked about modernity and decoloniality.

19:18 - this book is working with all of these things, by retelling and, you know, one retelling of the history of, political economy, adding an intersectionality to it and bringing in histories that, you know, most paradigms, even among many post-colonial thinkers or Marxist thinkers, do not really look seriously at the history before the rise of Europe to try to understand the longer struggles.

19:48 - so it's feminist and decolonial. and it's looking at, you know, the p micropolitics of intimacy through the macropolitics of states as one, critic of Caribbean studies discusses Donut Francis. I'll also add that recently some, scholars have been distinguishing post-colonial from de-colonial, from anti-colonial. And there's a lot of discussion about this. like my cohort in the inter, world Studies interdisciplinary project, we're,

20:22 - we think these things are connected at the root, these practices, and we worry about divisions between these, that really repeat some of, sometimes some of the competition that the states have, also for everyone. so, it's post-colonial in the ways people think about that is focusing on deconstructing empire and colonialism. It's decolonial in that it's trying to get outside of some

20:51 - of the Eurocentric epistemologies and methods, and it's intersectional by keeping gender at the core of questions about political economy. So we, I I think of it as decolonial and post-colonialism, both of them intersectional the book, I guess, like most things people do really, grows out of my, my childhood experience. short version, I promise. and that is that I grew up on the south side of Chicago, near the railroad tracks,

21:23 - white people on one side, black people on the other side, blood on the tracks. and so I was always trying to un just to understand that, where did this start? This makes no sense, you know, the, yeah, so I'll just leave that at that. so in one sense, all of my books have started there. The, the first one called Bordering on the Body, the Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture, which is a transatlantic study of, of,

21:56 - mother figures and the, their role, their pivotal sort of structural role in, in, in literature as they are racialized. So to the next book, freedom's Empire, which again, focuses on race in the Atlantic world and the freedom or enslavement story that has structured the novel in many ways. So, so this book, then what happened was I kept going further back in history and, in this book I found myself reading,

22:27 - about, you know, the all kinds of literature that was clearly borrowing forms from literature from the south and east, whether it's the Arabian or something else. So, and I was also, the book also grew out of my frustration with the, you know, sort of immunization or dismissal of the role that literature has played and the nature of literary study. And I wanted to make a case for that as part

23:02 - and parcel of all of this structural analysis of political economy, critical ones. yeah, I think, I'll leave it at that. Yeah. I wonder if you would allow me to read from the book, in answer to that question of what I want readers to take from it. so I hope this won't take too long, but get some light on the matter. so, I'll part read in part paraphrase.

23:36 - so Inter Imperity seeks to echo the relational call, the call to honor the struggles And the sustaining practices that often escape the frames of history and theory. it's, it's this effort to join the project of repairing, and reintegrating the worlds that Andros centric and imperial history have put us under. and it seems to me that the better we understand how we got here together over a very long DeRay,

24:09 - the more we can undo our habitual denial of our radically relational condition. and, that's from a, the end of a chapter earlier in the book. and this is from the very last page of the book. so I make reference, first of all to, u's novel, the river between, and he talks about two mountain ranges. I'm, I suggest that this is about buying empires, and there's a, there's a, there's a conflict at the center,

24:47 - that follows from a woman who dies after her. you know, the, the, she has her female circumcision, and that sets up a whole set of things. So again, women's reproductivity or not, pleasure or not, he does place at the heart of that novel. so I'll just read a little bit. and so in this valley, the young inhabitants must learn the truth that is also echoed in Chang Ray Lee's novel native speaker

25:25 - that quote, over the mountains, there are mountains. I ask why struggle to endure? and we might echo here, Alejo carpenter's question, in the kingdom of this world, why struggle to endure? And I, my answer is, because the world of water, sun, earth, and creaturely life that sustains us also calls us into relation, barely choosing.

25:54 - We respond because someone gave birth to each of us, and someone labored hard to keep us alive, however, imperfectly, because although as the enslaved Paul d and Toni Morrison's beloved knows Miss Doves sunlight, copper, dirt, moon, everything belonged to the men with the guns. We nonetheless find ourselves listening to the doves. The river runs between the mountains. It calls us back from betrayals and disavows.

26:29 - It carries care and cure, it reflects relations. It thickens us to aow and sustain them.

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