ABSTRACT
Yet, this history of inter-imperial dialectics also reveals that such deimperializing processes
have been under way for generations. The very existence of rebellion indicates as much, from
the ninth-century Zanj slave revolt in the Abbasid empire to the Arab Spring of the twenty-
first century. Perhaps this long history has also created an anti-imperial groove in our think-
ing-call it an infrastructure of critical imagination. Its dialectical legacy is evident in the
very academies we occupy. These institutions are still inter-imperially entangled, but many of
us are also anti-imperially oriented, and we influentially disseminate critical thought in print
and in thousands of classrooms. Integrating these new historiographies and framing our work
in this longer dure´e context, we may more effectively retool the material and ideological deter-
minations of our long dialectical past.
