ABSTRACT
Backed up by a global network of military bases that subvert the meaning of national sovereignty and by the leverage of monetary control assuring a steady flow of capital surplus to the United States from the rest of the world (first through gold, then starting in the 1970s, through the purchase of U.S. debt), the postcolonial global order of Pax Americana was conceived within a new synthesis of territory and colonial governmentality under the guise of postcolonial sovereignty, captured by the trope of area. This introduction provides a genealogy of area in relation to international law, the modern regime of translation, the modern system of internationality, communications technologies, and neoliberalism, providing a basis from which to understand the antiblack, anticommunist ethos that pervades area studies, and the Humanities in general under Pax Americana hegemony. Finally, the introduction suggests strategies for epistemic decolonization that go beyond the reversal of Western hegemony, calling instead for a world that is no longer organized by the areal schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity.
