Edward Said Memorial Lecture: Geometries of Imperialism in the 21st Century, Featuring Étienne Balibar

Join us for an engaging lecture by French philosopher Étienne Balibar, where he will explore the concept of imperialism and some of its elements, as it was used and enriched by Edward Said in his study of Orientalism and the cultural divides of modernity, which already had a complex genealogy. It combined a description of the spatial distributions of the world populations and civilizations with an understanding of the underlying structures of domination in terms of class and race.

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).

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