Abstract
We live in an age of empires—both old and new. Older empires stole humans, land, and resources while justifying their domination as both a right and a responsibility. The U.S. and European powers established imperial templates that combined military force with political, economic, and cultural domination, wielding influence across multiple colonies and within their borders. While these older empires persist, newer forms of empire-making increasingly rely on political, cultural, and technological influence. Yet, as examples such as China, India, and Israel demonstrate, genocide, brute military control, and occupation remain integral to imperial arsenals. As older forms of empire blend with newer iterations of domination, one constant endures: the ways that empires are forged and sustained through race, sexuality, and gender.
Reflecting on these issues requires an expansive view of race and sexuality. As we understand it, race is a modern colonial construct often seen in the West as inscribed on the body. However, the processes of racialization that drive imperial projects are far more complex. Social ideologies of racial difference, used to justify inequality, extend beyond chromatic and optical markers (Gilroy 2000) to include the politicization of other forms of difference—such as religion, caste, geography, descent, and immigration. Similarly, sexuality includes not only sexual identities and practices but also fundamental social aspects such as kinship, genealogy, inheritance, fertility, population management, health, and law (Puri 2016). Sexuality is integral to the social fabric, tightly linked with race and gender. This explains why imperial efforts at regulating women’s and queer sexualities, for example, impacted nearly every aspect of life in the colonies, with enduring repercussions in the metropolitan centers of the empire as well Patil 2022).
The following conversation pivots around the ways that empires, race, sexuality, and gender are coconstituted, that is, mutually created and interdependent. It opens with remarks from each of the participants before delving into the following themes: how colonies served as the empire’s laboratories even as these forms of governance boomeranged in the imperial centers; the dangerous ways that right-wing politics are on the rise in multiple parts of the world at a time when the U.S. and European empires are on the decline; and critical toolkits and future directions for contending with empire, race, and sexuality.
Openings
To start, it’s clear we need to critically understand the deep connections between empire, race, and sexuality—not as relics of the past, but as issues of urgent concern to our present. These are not abstract concepts; they’re about the lived realities of people today—the genocide in Gaza, people being killed or being dispossessed from their lands, forced to move as immigrants or refugees, settlers, or beneficiaries of empires. They’re also about epistemology—how we make sense of the world, the languages we use, the frameworks we rely on, what we’re taught to forget, and which version of history we learn.
To truly understand race and sexuality, we need a transnational approach that connects the heart of empires to their colonies and links colonies to one another. First, because empires didn’t just conquer lands—they introduced concepts like race and gender norms, using them to organize people and places in ways that served their control. Second, colonies often became laboratories of empire—sites where policing, laws, reproductive control, and technologies were developed and tested. These techniques were shared across imperial territories and eventually came home to affect marginalized populations within the imperial center itself. This imperial boomerang, as Césaire (1955/2001) described it, is a powerful reminder that empire is never just about “over there.” The domination practiced abroad has always had repercussions for the home nation as well. For me, taking a critical, decolonial approach to empire means recognizing these connections and understanding that their impacts are still very much with us today.
As we bear witness to ongoing conflicts and genocide in Palestine and beyond, I want to reflect on the role of imperialism, militarism, and war in shaping transnational and interconnected but differential concepts of race and sexuality. Empire operates through these frameworks, as seen in U.S.-sponsored wars ranging from World War II to the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and more recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. These wars have not only consolidated the global dominance of the United States as the empire of our time but have also racialized specific geographic areas and populations, branding them as dangerous terrorists or security threats. These logics of racialization are deeply gendered and sexualized.
Feminist and postcolonial scholars have long emphasized how intimate, sexual, marital, and reproductive relations were demarcated under and after major wars. Further, race was sexualized and sexuality was racialized, as imperial power regulated who could marry or have sex with whom, who could gain citizenship through interracial marriage, and whose children would be recognized as citizens (Stoler 2002). These practices established the entangled boundaries of race, sexuality, and membership within both the imperial metropole and its peripheries.
I would like to bring in the global Asian perspective, looking at how wars in Asia, such as the Korean and Vietnam wars, shaped racial dynamics both locally and in theUnited States. During the Korean War, for example, sexual and racial dynamics played out in military camp towns where Korean women had to sell sex and intimacy, among military brides brought to the United States, and among interracial children who either faced discrimination in Korea or were sent to adoption agencies (Cho 2009). These transnational dynamics shaped racialized and sexualized identities for Koreans individually and had broader implications for Korean Americans in the United States and in the larger global racial order. I believe that similar patterns can be observed in other U.S.-involved wars and their aftermaths.
I agree with the need to consider multiple forms of empire and subimperial powers in the global order. While U.S. hegemony remains dominant, other empires—both Western and non-Western—play significant roles. Western empires such as the Dutch, Spanish, British, and French maintain influence through diplomatic, economic, and cultural control over former colonies, such as through the British Commonwealth. Non-Western empires, including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese powers, cannot be dismissed in a monolithic analysis of U.S. imperialism. For example, the global rise of China as a counter-hegemonic power challenges U.S. dominance, while China’s pseudoimperial ties with societies across Asia and Africa underscore its role in neoimperial power. Additionally, regional powers such as Russia, India, and Iran act as imperial forces within their regions, while subimperial powers such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel contribute to U.S. dominance as junior partners. The multiplicity of imperial and sub-imperial networks highlights the complexity of the current global order.
As we pivot to the present, it’s worth reflecting on how theUnited States, an empire in its last gasp of decline, grapples with race, gender, and sexuality in its politics. The recent election highlighted how everything became gendered, explaining the defeat of the Democratic Party and that it was too soft on trans issues. For example, the focus on issues like the “trans volleyball player” myth or trans surgeries in prisons revealed how gender and sexuality were mobilized as distractions from deeper economic crises, which neither party addressed meaningfully. It was a fascinating thing to see this play out and consider if I could write about this with the theoretical apparatus I had.
This election also saw a South-Asian Black woman running for elected office, embodying many forces of empire, often articulated quite gleefully on her part. The discourse surrounding her candidacy was fascinating, with some celebrating her as a historic first while others criticized her perceived manipulation of identity. Trump’s remark that she “only recently became Black” highlighted tensions between race as a social construction and whether race is something you can choose if you identify as more than one thing. The public struggled to reconcile these narratives—was her identity fluidity an example of race as a construct, or did it feel opportunistic? How do we make sense of the mobilization of these different logics and rhetorics?
At the same time, our incoming vice-president, JD Vance, a symbol of class and gender politics, rose to prominence. His campaign merged retrograde gender politics, like his “lonely cat lady” comments, with a carefully crafted image of a self-made “trailer park guy,” backed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Analyzing this moment feels more challenging than studying past empires because we know how that story turns out. But as I look at this current election and the ways that empire, gender, and race came crashing up against one another, we can use tools from the past, but there’s a lot about the present that I am very much trying to figure out.
I am interested in connecting imperialism and domination to the rise of far-right politics and transnational and global populism. Leaders like Modi in India, Netanyahu in Israel, Trump in theUnited States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, and others illustrate how this kind of populism is not new. What’s unique today is how globalization and technology facilitate the sharing of strategies, tools, and even surveillance and weapons among these regimes.
These far-right movements with imperialist desires of domination operate at three scales: dominating domestic populations, exerting regional and sometimes global hegemony, and exchanging strategies, ideological and discursive tool and tactics, as well as the circulation of weapons and technologies of surveillance and using brute force as well. Where do gender, sexuality, and race fit in this contemporary landscape? I am really excited about an edited volume, Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques (Altay, Al-Ali, and Galor 2024). The authors are bringing theoretical and methodological tools to understand this landscape and how women and LGBTQ people often participate in and support far-right politics, joining with imperialist desires. In the United States, figures like Kamala Harris celebrating the U.S. military’s global dominance or Linda Thomas-Greenfield blocking accountability for Israel’s actions highlight how racialized and sexualized minorities can be complicit in systems of domination.
Racialized and sexuality minority communities, as well as other populations around the world, become targets for this kind of imperialist military brute force, and they are often scapegoated and targeted through sexist, racist, and homophobic discourse to consolidate power. But I do think more theorization is needed on how individuals within marginalized communities willingly participate in these systems, both domestically and transnationally. This could be one direction for future studies of gender, race, sexuality, and empire.
Empires’ Colonial Laboratories and Imperial Boomerangs
I appreciate Jyoti’s reference to laboratories, particularly in the plural, as it makes room for different examples. Unfortunately, Gaza is one such example, and I want to focus on the genocide currently unfolding there. Anthropologist Darryl Li, even before October 7, 2023, theorized Gaza as a laboratory for Israeli military occupation. He highlighted how the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Jerusalem are spaces where people are compressed, confined, and trapped under regimes of surveillance, military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, and now colonialism. Israel tests its advanced surveillance and weapon technologies in these occupied territories, marketing them globally as “field-tested.” Israel is now one of the world’s leading exporters of advanced and sophisticated weapons and surveillance technologies that are sought-after by regimes around the world.
While this can be discussed in academic or theoretical terms, there’s the danger of obfuscating the actual human realities of living in this so-called “laboratory.” Palestinians endure unimaginable horrors, from white phosphorus to other chemical weapons that brutalize their bodies and psyches. I don’t want to contribute to the pornographication of this violence but find that balance that lets me explicate the profound suffering.
The violence connects to the U.S. imperialism, as Israel’s actions are enabled by American support. The United States is aiding and abetting this genocide; weapons, funding, and political backing are part of this ecosystem, implicating American taxpayers in the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes that perpetuate the carceral state in Palestine. Yet, global resistance—from South Africa to other regions in the Global South—pushes for accountability, challenging both American empire and its proxy, Israel.
I also find it fascinating how much of the feminist rhetoric justifying genocidal violence relies on gendered discourse. The focus on “women and children” as victims erases Palestinian men, framing them by default as militants deserving of death. This hegemonic discourse forces us to advocate for recognition of the humanity and rights to bodily integrity and dignity of Palestinian men. How can queer feminist scholars affirm the dignity and the humanity of Palestinian men and understand that if we want to support the women and children, we have to support the fathers, sons, uncles, grandfathers, male cousins, male doctors and nurses, and journalists that are also part of this landscape.
Indeed, the unequal application of human rights—depending on who is deemed worthy of them—has been exposed as a facade, revealing the hypocrisy of empire. This hypocrisy is actually a form of imperial boomerang that is now haunting us. It is an epistemological return that lays bare the deepest inhumanity of the empire and our not being able to stop our own governments funding genocides. The imperial boomerang operates not only through technological advancements, policing, and violence but also at an epistemological level, forcing us to confront who we are as humankind in this world.
In this regard, I want to reflect on our roles as scholars in perpetuating the Global South—not in the geographic sense but as an epistemological laboratory for imperial knowledge production. Historically, Western systems of knowledge have relied on the Global South as an unlimited laboratory for cases and examples, which are then used to produce “knowledge” in Western universities, libraries, and think tanks, reinforcing global hierarchies of power. There are countless books and volumes, many produced by white scholars in the United States or Europe, titled Queer [Non-Western Country]. By contrast, it would be unthinkable to publish similar volumes and books titled Queer USA or Queer UK, illustrating how normalized these practices are under the guise of “area studies,” itself rooted in Cold War-era U.S. logic.
A particularly illustrative case is the controversy surrounding the edited volume Queer Korea (2020), part of Duke University Press’s Perverse Modernities series. While praised for exploring queer perspectives in heteropatriarchal Korean studies, its Korean translation in 2023 sparked significant criticism regarding representation, methodology, and the positionality of queer knowledge production. The criticisms began with an essay in the volume by a white anthropologist who sensationalized Korean queer informants’ narratives, using real names without informed consent. This escalated into broader concerns about how the white editor and his allies dismissed accountability and used legal threats to silence criticism, including against Korean queer activists and their supporters. The controversy became even more problematic because the volume was framed as an effort to de-center and decolonize while perpetuating the very colonizing dynamics it purported to challenge. Ultimately, the controversy underscores the ongoing epistemological violence at the intersections of race, empire, and sexuality, even within supposedly “progressive” fields like U.S.-centric queer theory (Jung 2024). It also raises questions about what it means for voices from the Global South to “speak back” when their critiques are ignored or silenced, even when articulated in the language of empire.
I’m still grappling with the earlier comments, particularly how the politics of the present have challenged me to think about the utility of toolkits we’ve built to understand empire. We’re witnessing a seismic shift, and the complexity of events makes them difficult to analyze. Reflecting on South Africa’s recent stand on Palestine, I was struck by how it evoked a history of global solidarity. Du Bois and others were excited about what the United Nations might mean and how Du Bois saw the potential of decolonization of African countries to transform the civil rights struggle in the United States. South Africa is able to take a stand on Palestine because of its own independence, especially given its history of apartheid and the deep ties between the Palestinian and South African struggles. Yet, this stands in contrast to South Africa’s internal struggles, which remain fraught because of wealth inequality and high rates of gender-based violence. What is the best analytic in which to understand such a contradiction? Is it contradictory?
My first book, Bringing the Empire Home (Magubane 2003), was about things that happen in the so-called “periphery” and come back to the core. I was struck by this during the events following October 7, 2023. Even though the career of Claudine Gay, heralded as the first Black president of Havard, was the furthest from people’s minds, she and other Ivy League presidents had to resign as a consequence of October 7. The academy, which once positioned itself as a global model of freedom and democracy, now reveals its own deep complicity and lack of autonomy. As someone trained in the 1990s, it’s striking to see how frameworks used to analyze “dictatorships in Africa” now apply to U.S. politics, from the rise of Trump to the erosion of democratic norms and a partisan, corporatized press.
This “imperial boomerang” exposed the limitations of the narratives I was taught. The institutions that once claimed to teach the world about democracy now struggle with their own fragility. Living through this moment is both unsettling and revealing, as the tools we used to analyze others’ politics now illuminate the realities at home in ways we never anticipated.
I think what postcolonial societies like South Africa or India are experiencing isn’t about contradictions but rather the inherent nature of power and domination. While the world wasn’t equal before colonialism, the systems introduced through European colonization continue to shape postcolonial realities. These systems—governance, law, territorial rule, and the racialized and gendered logics of colonialism—persist globally and are often embraced by postcolonial governments themselves.
Take Israel’s export of surveillance and military technologies as an example. India, which once supported Palestine, began officially importing Israeli arms in the 1990s. Today, these tools are widely deployed across India, particularly in Kashmir, one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world. But it’s not just about weapons—the Modi government has adopted tactics from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, with critics describing this as the “gazafication” of Kashmir (Zia 2020). These systems and technologies of control don’t remain confined to one place; they circulate, proliferate, and often find their way back to the imperial center.
Turning to another example, several conservative U.S. governments have enforced the global gag rule, which prohibits U.S. health funding to organizations worldwide if they provide, counsel, refer, or advocate for abortion. Even mentioning abortion risks losing funding not only for reproductive health but also for essential services like malaria and HIV/AIDS treatment. Domestically, these same conservative interests have been working for decades, and with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we now see the domestic manifestation of policies the United States first tested and implemented abroad.
This connects to the issue of surrogacy as well. Privileged U.S. citizens have long traveled to the Global South to hire surrogate mothers through IVF, often aiming to preserve their white genetic lineage while using indigent women of color as surrogates. While countries like India have placed restrictions on this practice, it continues elsewhere. Now, with abortion bans in many U.S. states, female-bodied people are being forced to carry pregnancies to term, mirroring the surrogacy model where women are treated as mere carriers or receptacles. These parallels highlight how systems of domination link the “here” and “there,” demonstrating that what is imposed elsewhere often comes back to haunt us. This underscores the urgency of resisting empire in all its forms.
Right-wing Politics and the Last Gasps of the U.S. Empire
I want to pick up on Zine’s point about the last gasp of the U.S. empire, a topic I’ve been reflecting on and recently discussed in class in the aftermath of the 2024 U.S. elections. Stuart Hall and others have noted how nations and empires and nations in decline can become particularly dangerous—not neutralized, but more volatile and aggressive. One theme worth exploring is how the politics of sexuality, gender, and race become increasingly complicated in this late stage of empire. These complexities are evident in the rise of right-wing populism and its global spread that you all have discussed.
We are likely witnessing the beginning of the end of American empire, though this process is agonizingly slow, particularly for the Palestinian people. For them, this is not just 400 days but 76 years of waiting for a ceasefire and an end to settler colonialism.
I want to highlight the global connections and transnational sharing of technologies and strategies among populist and nationalist projects. These connections manifest in varied but connected ways. In South Korea, recent efforts to transition women-only universities to co-ed institutions—seemingly for financial reasons without consulting faculty or students—have led to student protests. These protests, which contributed to the recent impeachment of President Yoon, challenge undemocratic decision-making and persistent anti-feminist backlash nurtured by the current government.
In both the United States and South Korea, these movements reflect a broader backlash against critical thinking, the privatization of education, and the corporatization of universities. Yet, responses to these issues are often compartmentalized. For example, liberals or progressives may address LGBTQ-inclusive education or faculty job security, but remain silent on threats to academic freedom or the privatized violence deployed against students and faculty. These issues, however, are fundamentally interconnected. Even among LGBTQ+ organizations, pinkwashing queer pride or other cultural events can become a battleground between pinkwashing and pinkwatching (Atshan 2020).
In South Korea, LGBTQ+ events like Seoul Pride and the Seoul International Pride Film Festival have faced criticism for pinkwashing. Despite activist calls for boycottingUnited States, British, and German embassy participation due to their governments’ funding of genocide in Palestine, Seoul Pride proceeded, justifying their decision as “politically neutral.” Similarly, the film festival canceled screenings of Israeli state-sponsored queer films after criticism but reiterated pinkwashing logic by implying queer films could only be produced in Israel because of sexuality-based persecution in other Middle Eastern societies—a false narrative.
These cases illustrate how a narrow focus on LGBTQ rights often ignores interconnected anticolonial struggles and how pinkwashing thrives not only in the United States and other Western contexts but also in subimperial contexts like South Korea. This calls for an analytical lens that examines how these dynamics function across different geopolitical settings, including sub-imperial and Global South contexts.
What I see happening on U.S. campuses today mirrors the same kind of brutality that, in the 1990s, institutions like Harvard’s Institute for International Development claimed to be eradicating globally by “teaching democracy.” Back then, we studied what made a democracy: a free press, fair elections, and independent institutions. Yet now, we see our own press compromised, our academy under assault, and billionaires openly influencing elections.
Nothing in that training prepared me for the rise of Trump—a leader who stormed the Capitol, refused to concede power, and undermined democratic norms. Ironically, we were taught to analyze these traits as hallmarks of African dictatorships, explained with frameworks that now describe our own political realities. If, in 1996, I had suggested the United States would reelect someone who disdains democratic institutions while the press and public capitulated, it would have been dismissed as impossible.
At the Kennedy School, programs like the Neiman Fellowship brought journalists from the Global South to “protect fledgling democracies,” with Harvard positioning itself as a beacon of democracy. I don’t know if it’s literally like receiving your own bullshit back. It’s unsettling to live through this moment and see the propaganda so clearly for what it is, even as someone who never fully believed in it. To watch the United States struggle with the same issues it once claimed to fix abroad is both ironic and profoundly revealing.
Critical Toolkits and Future Directions
When I think about our toolkit, a key strength is our understanding that race, class, gender, and empire are always fundamentally interlinked. For example, lynching was justified through the racialized construction of Black masculinity, demonstrating how race and gender cannot be separated and how they serve empire.
Now, we see a similar logic with different results: the forced compartmentalization of these interlinked oppressions enables empires to manipulate them strategically. For instance, Israel claims to be “gender-forward” to justify its actions, using progressivism on LGBTQ issues to distract from and even legitimize genocide. This tactic—disconnecting interlinked categories of oppression—creates a dodge: “Don’t look here; look over there.”
This logic extends beyond Israel. In theUnited States, we see the erasure of the racialized and gendered nature of the working class, reframing it as predominantly white, while sidelining issues like unions and labor rights, as seen in Kamala Harris’s agenda targeting Black men. While we have the tools to analyze these dynamics, we need to refine and reassemble them to apply to the present, where connections are more obscured than in the past.
Yet, spectacular events like October 7 or leaks like WikiLeaks reveal these interconnections, exposing how technologies like Israeli surveillance tools are deployed globally. The complexities of today’s empires may be harder to map than those of the nineteenth century, but our toolkit from studying the past provides the foundational pieces—we just need to adapt them to the present’s unique challenges.
As we conclude, I’m reflecting on where we go from here, particularly in knowledge production within the academy. All of us are based in U.S. institutions, and as we brace for the incoming administration or regime, many of us feel an existential angst. The world is literally burning, the future of humanity is uncertain, and young people are inheriting a broken world where even having children feels ethically fraught. In this landscape, what is the role of the public intellectual in this landscape? There’s no easy answer, but it’s a question we must confront.
Our institutions are deeply implicated in systems of power, such as private prisons and weapons manufacturing. For instance, why does Cornell University need to partner with the Technion, an Israeli institution linked to weapons development that is part and parcel of Israeli occupation? This example is emblematic of other institutions as well. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans—and similar regimes globally—see intellectuals as enemies. Universities, already under assault from neoliberalism, now face heightened attacks: threats to accreditation, endowments, Title VI weaponization, and McCarthy-like censorship. Scholars of empire, race, sexuality, or Palestine, particularly queer, feminist, and scholars of color, will be especially vulnerable.
In this moment, we need thoughtful responses, not defensiveness. We must introspectively articulate the value of liberal arts and knowledge production to a broader public. While some colleagues will disappoint us—self-censoring or failing to show up—there will also be solidarity. Despite repression, we must cultivate intimacy, community, and joy. As scholar Evren Savcı notes (Savci 2021), right-wing politics has mastered enchantment, while progressive politics often fails to inspire in the same way. Joy and community are not callous responses to catastrophe; they are essential forms of resistance.
I plan to double down on my ethical commitments, integrity, and professional goals, pursuing joy and enchantment within the academy and beyond. I encourage others to do the same. In a time of despair, these commitments are acts of defiance and hope.
I’ve been reflecting on sexual resistance in times of political instability, and two striking images come to mind. First, the recent impeachment movement in South Korea, where K-pop fans—predominantly young women in their 20s and 30s—filled the streets with colorful lightsticks, reimagining heteronormative forms of support and channeling them into new political sentiments. Feminist and queer folks joined in, visibly building solidarity and joy while resisting new forms of authoritarianism.
Second, I think of queer content creators, particularly of Palestinian and Arab descent, incorporating symbols of resistance like the keffiyeh into sexually explicit content. These acts challenge oppressive portrayals, such as Zionist narratives of Israel as a “gay haven,” while navigating the hyper-commercialized platform economy. They raise questions about the intersections of joy, pleasure, and resistance within racial capitalism.
Another example is from Hong Kong, where research shows young people—both straight and queer—responding to political instability under Chinese authoritarianism through radical sexual practices, such as BDSM and sex clubs (Tsui 2024). Political resistance can sometimes be self-destructive, but it’s also a form of self-care, fostering intimate and caring communication toward each other. While my thoughts on this are still evolving, these examples illustrate how intimacy and sexuality can become forms of resistance.
Sa’ed’s point about the assault on universities in the United States highlights a broader agenda, particularly targeting critical race theory, trans and queer politics, and other critical frameworks. At its core, this assault is about rewriting history to align with specific ideological viewpoints. I think that our task, as scholars, students, and educators, is to resist this rewriting and ensure that we do not forget—neither the histories of empire, domination, and suffering nor the contributions of thinkers such as Du Bois, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and others, who have provided the critical tools we rely on today.
This is a collective and collaborative responsibility, for what seems distant will inevitably affect us. Our lives are deeply interconnected with others, and our lives “here” will not be secure until lives “there” can be lived in dignity and safety. If each of us commits to tending to the “here” and “there”—however we define them—we can collectively sustain the critical traditions that connect us across time and place.
Thank you so much for this insightful and thought-provoking conversation.
