ABSTRACT
Latinx Studies scholars have focused their analytical lens on the topic of empire to make visible, as Lazaro Lima writes how “scattered remains throughout the Americas cross national borders as well as affective states of being”. For Latinx Studies scholars, empire building begins with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas; it’s the wealth built on the back of exploited Africans and indigenous peoples that fueled the huge conquests of territories and people in the Old and New Worlds. The material conquest of the Americas went hand in hand with the ideological framing of the New World space and its peoples as a blank slate absent of history and culture to be written on by technologies of empire. US empire building throughout the Americas has resulted in increased economic dependency as well as displacement of people. Some Latinx and Latin American scholars have used Michael Hardt/ Antonio Negri’s formulation to identify a posthegemonic empire at work.
