Edward Said Memorial Lecture: Geometries of Imperialism in the 21st Century, Featuring Étienne Balibar
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First, the definitions coined by socialist and especially Marxist theorists in the early 20th century articulated empire, the industrial revolution, capitalism and colonialism, focusing on the power struggles leading to global wars. In the heydays of the category, through the 20th century, it centered on the confrontation between imperialism as a “hegemonic” system and various “anti-imperialist” forces, coinciding with the Cold War, formal decolonization, the antagonism between a Global North and a Global South.
Insistent traces of these configurations are visible in today’s construction of the world, as illustrated by the tragic history of Palestine. However, renewed analytic and political uses of “imperialism” as a meaningful concept in the postsocialist and postcolonial age, with an economy dominated by financial capital, a global division of labor and extractivist exploitation of resources, a new struggle for hegemony between East and West and a planetary environmental catastrophe, call for the elaboration of a different “geometry” (Giovanni Arrighi).
Speakers
Étienne Balibar
French philosopher
Étienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is also professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, 2015).