Within empires, the highest levels of power—the three branches in the case of the U.S. government—struggle with each other over whose organizing principle will dominate. Once a victor comes to the fore, certain areas do not conform and become the excess. These excess spaces mark the intersection of several spheres of influence, leading to ambiguous power arrangements and feuds. Guantanamo Bay is a paradigm example of such excess. The executive and judicial branches conflict over who can lay claim to the base and its detainees in the hopes of absorbing the space and augmenting their respective influence. Presidential actions and rhetoric 2001-2004 and the Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush (2004) indicate that both branches’ tool of choice was the detainees’ personhood, meaning their claim to rights before the law. Each branch defined the prisoners’ humanity in terms most useful for expanding its scope. The executive tried to dehumanize them and eliminate their standing; the judiciary countered by extending statutory habeas corpus and legal personhood to the detainees. Rasul v. Bush serves as the flashpoint for understanding how the agents within an empire’s highest tiers exploit excess spaces to expand their role in organizing the empire.

The question of PTSD in Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans returning home has stirred increasing anxieties about the deep and tacit networking of trauma (and its unnerving sequelae) in the American cultural zeitgeist. Now, more than ever, the question of empire warrants a hermeneutic which can consider the locutions of trauma, its unspeakability, its repetitions, and the generation of fantasy. As the subject of contemporary psychoanalysis, fantasy is the site of the concealment of trauma. This is a study of the ways texts contact the networks of unresolved social and historical traumas using popular film and television as a venue of repression, representation, and the conduit and production of imperial desires and disciplines. Through close, psychoanalytic readings, Spider-man III and an episode of Sex in the City construct two alternate fantasies of a post-9/11 Manhattan, implicating a new psychoanalytic history of the city as a node of American empire. The investigation of texts, and the unconscious articulation of tropes of empire assembling after catastrophe, reveals a tortured history and a haunting of culture that implicity engages fields of discourse, manufactures the desire for empire and its reconstitution, and the intrapsychic reorganization of history.

 To me the imperial field is a space where power between the dominant and less dominant is negotiated. This field can be very violent and inflict trauma on the less dominant and invisible. Through this invisible violence, an empire has the power to take away identity, history, and nationhood and make a whole group of people invisible by taking away their power. My research project will manifest the imperial field through the literary works of two well known Samoan authors Sia Figiel and Albert Wendt, who addresses the violence of the imperial field through their novels. I will be focusing on one book from each author, Where We Once Belonged by Figiel and Pouliuli by Wendt, and analyze how they make the invisible and naturalized violence visible and unnatural. By analyzing their novels, I search for evidence that express the effects of violence and how indigenous people find ways to cope or lessen the effects of violence. Through the analysis of Figiel and Albert’s literary work, I hope to show that novel writing is a form of resistance and that the transmission of trauma into literature can be both a therapeutic and a political reaction. I hope to show that the effects of empire are not total or hopeless and that there are ways to reclaim or recreate a lost identity, history, and nationhood.

I reconsider the apparent ease with which the Sandwich Islands Mission, sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), incorporated itself within the Hawaiian social order during the first half of the 19th century. On its face the Mission’s influence is perplexing; its contingent was numerically insignificant; it lacked the direct sponsorship of an imperial occupational force; and it sought a radical transformation of Hawaiian belief and behavior. The ABCFM spoke of their ‘instrumentality’ as a vehicle for the salvation of Heathen Hawaiian. Their standpoint contrasts markedly to the position of the Hawaiian monarchy, which, I argue, saw the Sandwich Islands Mission as serving important symbolic, political, and disciplinary purposes. After Cook’s arrival, alliances and relationships entered between Kamehameha, his governors, British imperial representatives, and capitalist merchants effectively severed the complex reciprocal bonds long established between the chiefs and priests, the commoners and the land. Successive waves of epidemic and disease halved the pre-contact population within a period of mere decades. A half-century after Cook, with the Hawaiian sociopolitical frame in transformation and illness constituting an ominous threat, the missionaries’ arrival was ultimately useful (though certainly problematic) for the Hawaiian monarchy. I claim that Hawaii’s entrance into the world system - politically, economically and epidemiologically - altered a pre-contact sociopolitical balance that would have otherwise significantly diminished the influence of the ABCFM in the early years of the Hawaiian monarchy.

The 1994 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas has been marked as a watershed for resistance to neoliberalism. I argue that it offers something more substantial—I will address the Zapatista uprising as a revolution of democratic relations. As an event, the EZLN’s armed uprising aimed to both create and maintain a distinctive space, a civil forum in which alternative modes of political emancipation might be brought into existence. The EZLN leadership has affirmed that, in contrast to an orthodox revolution which would take over state institutions, it is carrying out “a revolution that will make the revolution possible,” establishing a vantage point from which to critique the existing Mexican nation. In one interview, Subcomandante Marcos articulated the goal of the uprising to be a “sort of democratic space for the resolution of confrontation between diverse political proposals.” The Zapatistas’ counterhegemonic assertion of indigenous agency brought hegemonic Mexican nationalist logic to a crisis and affected, in Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, a “functional change in a sign system” used to understand marginal identities. Broadly, I examine how the uprising operated to counterpose political relations that modify the form of the nation-state. I show the extent to which the EZLN disrupted the stability of the Mexican state’s project of self- legitimation. When the indigenous struggle of resistance was reinvented by the EZLN as the struggle for autonomy, the fact of indigenous difference became central to the new nation-building goals of the movement. As the EZLN first reclaimed, reanimated, and generalized the symbol of the Indian drawn from nationalist discourse, state officials interpreted the movement as a profound threat to the ruling party’s long-standing claim to power. A proposal of alternative emancipation changes popular understandings of existing political relations and allows for the unimagined to be made real.

 The goal of this essay is to investigate the cultural work of contemporary incarnations of the "Western" through cinema. The essay is broken into two parts, the first of which considers the basis for such an investigation, demonstrating historically the cultural work of classical Western. The guiding questions that I attempt to address through this consideration concern the relation of culture productions to society: how have classical narratives depicted acts of violence and what is the relationship of violence to law? What framework or worldview makes these acts feasible? What role does religion, class, race and gender play in this framework? Without trying to exhaustively answer these questions, I hope to merely provide a frame of reference concerning the cultural and ideological function of the Western, which would enable a more informed analysis of its contemporary incarnations. Having established this frame of reference I will attempt, in the second part of the essay, to distinguish between two forms of contemporary Westerns. I will argue that the first, which I term neo-western, simply reiterates particular ideologies present in classic Western. The second, termed "post-Western," incorporates and considers several themes present in classical Western narratives but complicates and critiques their logic and ideologies in a variety of ways. Considerable analytical emphasis is placed on this last consideration wherein I have tried to address a second set of guiding questions: how have “post-Westerns” engaged and reworked classical Western narratives? To what end? How do these novels critique certain conceptions of American identity? To what extent do post-westerns re-imagine American identity? What, if any, are the implications of this re-imagination? Finally, I conclude by exploring the possible reasons for the existence of these two largely antithetical forms of contemporary Westerns in terms of American identity.

During the redemocratization of the post-military regime of the late 70's to mid-80's in Brazil, the demands of women's liberation movements indicated a crisis of modernity that compelled the state to reorganize in a way that responded to mass violence and inequality, resulting in women's police stations. Because the faculties of the state are still patriarchal, the interactions between women in the stations are bound to the reproductions of difference that restrains full cultural citizenship. This paper discusses cultural citizenship in the terms of Miller's (2006) "the right to know and speak" determined by the contingencies of everyday practices that construct and relegate identities and representations into hierarchies of rights and privilege. It suggests that the interactions between women within the stations, through which the state performs, contest the cultural citizenship of women to whom multiple and variable identities have been ascribed. Although stations have increased the reporting of violent crimes committed against women, they do not address the pervasive normativity and naturalization of violence as a legitimate form of power in Brazil and the imperial field. Stations have primarily served to assuage rowdy feminists, simultaneously containing them in a web of unperturbed legal and social patriarchy. Thus, stations serve to address the crisis of modernity that women's liberation creates and not imperial gendered violence. The stations become sites in which female actors must work through their cultural citizenship within the imperial field that subordinates them.