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Mapping and Translation as Tactics to Amplify Anti-Imperialist Education

Sun, April 27, 8:00 to 9:30am MDT (8:00 to 9:30am MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 702

Abstract

A growing number of U.S. educators of Color (Chavez-Moreno, 2021; Coloma, 2013) argue that U.S. imperialism must be confronted in educational research and practice. As a settler-colonial empire and contemporary global geopolitical and economic hegemon with more than 800 military bases worldwide, the United States relies on an array of heterogeneous techniques to project its power globally (Stoler, 2008). These include military invasions and interventions, armed support for proxies, coup d’états, occupations, political assassinations, as well as economic embargoes, sanctions, and austerity regimes. These imperial acts have led to countless civilian deaths, the destruction of infrastructure and cultural sites, forced migration, and widespread humanitarian and environmental crises in the Global South, while profiting U.S. elites with impunity and apathy.

Reparations, which can be understood as making amends for injustice or past injury, are often (though not exclusively) defined and imagined in material terms. However, the enormity and frequency of U.S. imperial actions over centuries have created enduring structural inequities and political instability. These ongoing realities make calculating the material value of redressing the harms and injustices carried out by the U.S. government a daunting task. This task is rendered more complex by two factors: first, in acknowledging that the shared harms of U.S. imperialism are not solely material, and second, that mainstream political discourses reinforce bipartisan registers of U.S. exceptionalism, an ideology that justifies political violence and does not/cannot make U.S. imperialism visible as a contemporary phenomenon. These challenges suggest that the work of anti-imperialist educational scholars of Color is a labor of an open-ended duration, which entails mapping and translating as terrains of struggle and liberation.

In this conceptual paper, I will explore four interrelated understandings for educational scholars of Color to fully comprehend, name, and confront the unrepairable harms of U.S. imperialism—material, psychic, epistemic, and temporal/intergenerational. While these distinctions may not fully encapsulate the harms wrought by U.S. imperialism, I argue that together, they provide necessary contexts for comparative analysis to draw connections across struggles and synthesize multi-sited, transnational, and solidaristic understandings. By theorizing U.S. imperialism in these ways, this paper significantly articulates how educational scholars of Color are uniquely positioned to stage ongoing educational interventions across the multiple dimensions of U.S. imperialism and to translate them across multiple audiences for anti-imperialist reparation.

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