NYC DSA Academy - Making Sense of U.S. Empire
Applications are now closed for this course
Course title: Making Sense of U.S. Empire
Instructors: Nikhil Pal Singh, Steven Hahn
Dates: Mondays 7–9pm • Oct. 28, Nov. 11, Nov. 25, Dec. 9, 2024
Location: Sixth Street Community Center, 638 E. 6th St., NYC 10009
(Course is in-person only)
What does it mean to understand the United States as an empire-state, rather than as a nation-state? In this course we will examine this question over a series of historical arcs, and social and political transformations: the 18th-century unification and expansion of English settler colonies, the 19th-century history of continental and overseas warfare and colonization, and the 20th-century rise of the U.S to global military power.
In each instance, we will explore the imperial ambition and architecture of U.S. nationhood as a form of rule constituted by a political effort to control the land and labor of “non-national” (both indigenous and exogenous) others, a legal and military process of turning what was often imagined as wild, empty, or abstract space into substantive territorial jurisdiction, and a consolidation of economic claims upon productive resources, commercial and financial networks.
Throughout the course, we will foreground and examine the contradictory social and political dynamics that have resulted from a vision of American freedom and democracy grounded in the rule of law and the prosperity of formally equal, sovereign citizens, that consistently depended upon open-ended projections of coercive force (both inwardly and outwardly directed), and expansions of governmental power without political representation.
The course will consist of four sessions:
- The U.S. as Settler Colony
- “Continentalism” and Expansionary Warfare
- Globalism, Hegemony, and Counterinsurgency
- Imperial Decline and Nationalist Assertion
Professor Bios:
Nikhil Pal Singh received his PhD from Yale University and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. His first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, published by Harvard University Press in 2004 was recognized as the best book in US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians. Singh worked for many years with legendary black freedom movement activist Jack O’Dell, gathering, editing and introducing O’Dell’s collected essays and movement writings in Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder, published by University of California Press in 2010. In 2014 Singh helped to create and develop the NYU Prison Education Program (PEP), serving as its founding faculty director until 2023. Race and America’s Long War, Professor Singh’s last book, is an examination of the relationship between race, war, and policing in U.S. domestic life and overseas conflict, published by University of California Press in 2017. Singh has been interviewed and published widely across left and progressive media, including at Jacobin’s The Dig and Behind the News podcasts, in The Nation, The Intercept, Dissent, the Verso blog, The New Republic, Salvage, The New Statesmen, and Boston Review. He currently serves as a series editor for the American Crossroads book series at the University of California Press and is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, based in Washington DC. His next book, Reconstructing Democracy, a collection of essays on U.S. empire and black intellectual history, is forthcoming from the University of California Press
Steven Hahn received his PhD at Yale University and is currently Professor of History at New York University. He is a specialist on the international history of slavery, emancipation, and race, on the construction of American empire, and on the social and political history of the “long 19th century” in the United States. He has written for The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The New York Times, as well as for The American Historical Review and Past and Present, and is the author of The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and The Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry (winner of the Allan Nevins Prize and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award), A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and Merle Curti Prize), The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, and A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910. He is also co-author and co-editor of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, and Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation—Land and Labor in 1865. He is completing a textbook called Contested America: A History of the United States and the People Who Made It. Illiberal America, Hahn’s latest book, was just published by W.W. Norton. Hahn has been actively involved in projects making history and liberal arts education available to a wider public, and is currently teaching in NYU’s Prison Education Program.
About the NYC DSA Academy for Socialist Education:
Education,
broadly defined, is and always has been a vital function of
revolutionary socialist movements. The NYC DSA Academy aims to enhance
the ongoing political education efforts of the New York chapter of DSA.
Designed to connect the history and theory of socialist struggles with
the work of today’s activists, the Academy aims to offer a rigorous but
accessible curriculum for working adults to develop their understanding
and strategy.
Sponsored by
