It is now over twenty years since Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease published their substantial edited collection Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke Univ. Press, 1993). In her introductory essay to the volume, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” Kaplan considered how the notion of imperialism was long viewed as antithetical to an understanding of US culture. The collection’s aim, therefore, was to remove the aura of historical exceptionalism from our conception of the United States. Instead, as she put it, the essays there compiled would reveal “the multiple histories of continental and overseas expansion, conquest, conflict, and resistance which have shaped the cultures of the United States and the cultures of those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical boundaries” (4). Cultures indeed offered a generation of scholars versed in cultural studies masterful examples of how to read the myriad...

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