ABSTRACT
New critical histories of American power continued to appear in the 1980s, evident in studies by Emily Rosenberg, Glenn Anthony May, and others. It was not until the late 1990s, however, that empire fully re-emerged. A flood of books with “empire” in their titles followed, each grappling with the concept and its applications with varying degrees of rigor and success. An important caveat applies : despite its present ubiquity within the academy, empire remains an insurgent category in the American public imagination, commonly found in the pages of progressive periodicals but minimized or absent elsewhere. The elastic boundaries of what empire is, does, and means present further complications. In its classic sense, an empire is a large state governing spaces and peoples beyond its core territories. Grammars of inclusion and exclusion – the citizen vs. the subject – are a key distinguishing feature of rule and shape life within the empire.
