Empire

It is a commonplace in American studies to consider the nation’s founders as progenitors of the conception of the United States as an “exceptional” empire such that Thomas Paine’s oft-cited aphorism “We have it in our power to begin the world all over again” begets Thomas Jefferson’s call for an “Empire of Liberty,” which, in turn, would spread freedom across the globe in the name of the equally pithy and consecrated Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” What then is particular and theoretically constitutive of the keyword “empire” for the field of Latina/o studies? “Empire” is the keyword that frames both the field of Latina/o studies and what Latina/o studies projects interrogate in order to make visible how empire’s scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well as affective states of being. In so doing, Latina/o studies’ methodological recourse to and critique of empire seeks to apprehend empire’s legacies beyond the singular historical actor model of the exceptional nation-state in order to engage how empire saturates and conditions affects across space, time, and bodies. This is particularly significant when we consider that Latinas/os are the nation’s largest “minority” at over 55 million strong yet the most underrepresented in national institutions, circuits of power, and political blocks. Yet despite this daunting demographic reality, the absence of Latinas/ os from circuits of power largely render this expansive demographic of multitudes of variegated latinidades invisible. As Kirsten Silva Gruesz (2003, 56) succinctly diagnosed the vagaries of the Latina/o question, “as Marx said of capital, Latinos seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once.” What are the mechanisms that both delimit Latina/o political emergence and sustain Latina/o invisibility despite the demographic evidence to the contrary?