Power and Authority in the Era of Trump: A Roundtable on the New American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

What are the terms that describe modes of power in the era of Trump and what are the conceptual tools that we need to think about these modes of power? Our panel participants have published recently or are in the process of publishing books about power, authority, neoliberalism, race, gender, sexuality in relation to surveillance, militarism, securitization, and capitalism. Drawing from these works, our overarching question remains what are the variegated forms of masculinist and racial authorities constitutive of American imperialist regimes in the past and present? Additionally, we will consider the following questions:

--What differentiates Trumpian patriarchal ethnonationalism from GW Bush’s multicultural nation-building and Obama’s humanitarian interventionist strategy?

--What happens to capitalist liberalism and its moral/humanitarian/democratic authority?

--Is neoliberalism waning or invigorated by Trumpism?

--Is the Comaroff’s idea of “theory from the South” useful to think through Trumpism and what are its limits?

--What are the factors that contribute to the splintering in the right-wing (for example, the “New American Century” nation-building vs. an ideological ruse of isolationalism that masks the realities of capitalist expansion and flexible accumulation)?

-What do we make of the resurgence of a highly fantasized trans/national white racial sovereignty and its contestations?

-- What forms of labor exploitation are envisioned in the shift toward 21st-century kleptocracy? (guard labor, extractive high-risk laborers, automated labor, care work, social reproduction, sex work) What are the racial, gender, and class formations of these labor patterns?

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Caren Kaplan, University of California, Davis

Panelists

• Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin

• Inderpal Grewal, Yale University

• Jennifer Terry, University of California, Irvine

• Anne McClintock, Princeton University

Comment

• Caren Kaplan, University of California, Davis