Empire as a Relevant Category of Analysis in U.S. Educational Research

• In Event: The Project of Decolonization: Taking on Our Sacred Discourse

Abstract

Objectives
This paper serves as an intervention into two fields of scholarship: it challenges the inadequate attention to issues of education in studies of imperialism and colonialism; and the relative absence of empire as an analytical category in studies of education. Ten years have passed since the publication of Cameron McCarthy’s The Uses of Culture (1997) and John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World (1999), two groundbreaking projects in education that considerably engage the theories and methods of postcolonial studies. In spite of such projects that have paved ground for rigorous engagements, the use of empire as a relevant lens for critical investigations has not been fully developed in educational theorizing and research.
Theoretical Framework
Drawing from Michel Foucault’s notion of archaelogy (1969), the paper maps out the epistemic formations that shape the conceptual contours enabling the emergence and development of empire as a necessary category of analysis in U.S. educational studies.
Methods and Data Sources
It undertakes an extensive review of the educational literature in and about the United States by examining major general journals (i.e., Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review, and Teachers College Record), discipline-specific journals (i.e., History of Education Quarterly, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and Educational Theory), field-specific journals (i.e., Educational Administration Quarterly), topic-specific journals (i.e., Race Ethnicity and Education), and research journals (i.e., Qualitative Studies in Education).

Results
The paper outlines three discursive fields that offer productive nodes: indigenous and ethnic studies, critical global studies, and postcolonial studies. By elaborating on these three areas as sites of inquiry and intervention on the operations of U.S. imperialism, the paper proceeds to exploring their effects, both actualized and potential, in educational studies. The effects, such as hybrid methodologies, trans/national connections, and more complicated conceptualization of subjectivity and agency, reveal the intellectual, empirical, and political spaces that open up with the use of empire as an analytical category. Ultimately the paper offers a conceptual engagement of empire and education to investigate the relations between the metropole and the colony and to interrogate knowledge production, circulation, and contestation in our theorizing, research, and teaching.
Scientific and Scholarly Significance
This paper contributes to the growing field of U.S. empire studies, which has a historical genealogy dating back to sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1907) and historian William Appleman Williams (1959). A critical mass of Americanists and transnationalists emerged in the 1990s not only to challenge disciplinary orthodoxies and prevailing understandings, but also to generate fresh analytics (Kaplan & Pease, 1993; Stoler, 2006; Hardt & Negri, 2000). The new vanguards, wielding innovative interpretive and methodological techniques from the humanities and social sciences and from the vantage points of ethnic, feminist, queer, and cultural studies, have set their analytical gaze upon the continental conquest and expansion of the United States, its overseas occupations, and its deterritorialized domination.

Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, University of Toronto - OISE