Click on a session title for abstracts and summary videos!
Session 1: Borders and Narratives of Imperial Power
Presentations by Yumna Siddiqi on “Borders and Anxieties of Empire,” Molly Slavin on “‘Crime and the Border’: Locating imperial anxiety and narratives of crime,” and Maryam S. Griffin on “The Muslim Ban and the Imperial Anxieties of Colorblindness and Uneven Mobilities.”
Session 2: Epistemology and Imperial Reproduction
Presentations by Temitope Ogungbemi on “The Populist West: Critical subjectivity and the politics of counter-terrorism in Nigeria,” Mariam Durrani on “Examining the Co-production of the ‘Imperial’ University in Lahore and New York City,” and Max Clayton on “Empire’s Anxiety and Indigeneity: Recent American studies critiques of U.S. empire.”
Session 3: Subjects of Empire and Occupation
Presentations by Jason Dittmer on “Gibraltar and the Making and Re-making of Europe,” Yousef K. Baker on “Imperial Crisis and Racialized Militarization: Reconceptualizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq,” and Galen Murton on “The Power of Blank Spaces: A critical cartography of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”
Session 4: Staging Empire, Visualizing Otherness
Presentations by Maria Bose on “Cinema’s Hegemony: Imperial and cinematic futures at the start of the Asian century” and Tosin Gbogi on “Race and Migrant Bodies in Contemporary African Poetry.”
Session 5: Migration Divides: Race, religion, and othering
Presentations by Arun Chaudhuri on “The Prince and the Governors: The anxious locations of race and religion in South Asian American immigrant histories” and Kirsten Wesselhoeft on “Islam, Anti-Racism, and the Anxieties of French Diversity Politics.”
Session 6: The Power to Police: Biopolitics and contemporary empire
Presentations by Salah Khan on “Resistance and the Info-sphere,” Kristin Bright on “Strangers in Their Own Flesh: An intimate story about Trump and Modi,” and Carly Thomsen on “Mechanisms of Empire’s Reproduction: An analysis of crisis pregnancy centers.”
Session 7: Conference Summary and Wrap-Up
A roundtable discussion with all presenters, led by conference organizers Tamar Mayer and Daniel Silva, in which emergent themes are discussed, questions for future research are highlighted, and feedback is shared.
