Eighth Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference

Anxieties of Empire: New Contexts, Shifting Perspectives

March 5-7, 2020

Although the era of “hard” European imperialism had effectively ended by the middle of the twentieth century, the power dynamics established under that system persist to the present day; so do anxieties about the hegemon’s stability and cultural integrity, which had also defined the earlier imperial period.

The current stage of Empire involves a global system of power in which international elites exercise political, economic, and/or physical domination over the spaces and bodies of marginalized people, driven in part by fear of being overwhelmed by them.

In this interdisciplinary conference, we will use the critical framework of “imperial anxiety” to examine policy decisions, economic imperatives, subject-formation, and global cultural production under the new imperial regime. Ultimately, we aim to theorize imperial systems of the past as well as subsequent articulations of Western imperialism and current non-Western imperial projects.

Organizers and Contact Information

Tamar Mayer, Professor of Geography, Director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, mayer@middlebury.edu

Daniel F. Silva, Associate Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, Interim Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, dfsilva@middlebury.edu

Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs
Robert A. Jones 59 House
148 Hillcrest Road
Middlebury, VT 05753