Of Violence and the U.S. Empire: Militarization, Colonialism and Unruliness

Catalog description

While the neoliberal ethos of the last decades has mandated the shrinking of governments in their multiple iterations, militaries have come out unscathed. In the 2021 fiscal year, for example, more than half of the discretionary budget by the U.S. federal government went to defense and military spending. The figure follows a historical trend suggestive not only of the centrality of the Armed Forces in U.S. nationalist imaginings and capitalist undertakings, but also of the difficulty of civil society in envisioning non-militarized ways of existence. Such difficulty has a history and consequences. Their unveiling necessitates a reckoning with the workings of settler colonialism and the U.S. Empire. This course will focus on the tense and complex ways through which the U.S. has organized itself to produce violence and legitimate its use. It will specifically interrogate what militarization means and how it is linked to colonialism. It will further explore unruly calls for a different world in which human relations are not mediated by (raw) violence and in which liberation, security and humanitarianism are not militarized. The course may build upon the work of Catherine Lutz, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, David Vine, Cynthia Enloe, Katherine McCaffrey, Robert Rabin, Suzuyo Takazato and others.