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Publication Information: Book Title: Cultures of United States Imperialism. Contributors: Amy Kaplan - editor, Donald E. Pease - editor. Publisher: Duke University Press. Place of Publication: Durham, NC. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 22.

Donald E. Pease

T he idea for this volume germinated in the shadow of three macropolitical events -- the end of the cold war, the Persian Gulf War, and the Columbian quincentennial. While the breakdown of cold war ideology made formerly submerged heterogeneous cultural histories available to public and scholarly discourse, clashes over the celebration of the Discovery made visible an absent imperial history that the Gulf War, in its renewal of an imperial synthesis, threatened once again to eclipse.

Contested by alternative histories, the official celebration of the Discovery covered up what Richard Van Alstyne had demonstrated persuasively in Rising American Empire; namely, that U.S. culture was from its origins grounded on "an imperium -- a dominion, state or sovereignty that would expand in population and territory, and increase in strength and power." ¹ Although the United States' imperial nationalism was predicated on the superiority of military and political organization as well as economic wealth, it depended for its efficacy on a range of cultural technologies, among which colonialist policies (exercised both internally and abroad) of conquest and dominion figured prominently. The invasive settlement of the Americas provided a vast space wherein were linked as related claims on the "unmapped territories" the imperatives of reason and conquest. In shaping the "New World" according to the demands of the emergent sciences of geography, botany, and anthropology, imperialism understood itself primarily as a cultural project involved in naming, classifying, textualizing, appropriating, exterminating, demarcating, and governing a new regime.

The anthropological concept of culture depended upon the Americas as the theater for colonial encounters wherein it discovered its objects as well as its mode of knowledge. When resitu-

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...the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its postcolonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literature everywhere. What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial.