Anthropology

All graduate students are invited to a discussion of Julian Go’s paper (in progress) titled “Colonialism’s Ends:
Field Theory and the Contraction of the Imperial Repertoire of Power” on Friday April 15th at 10:30 am.  The discussion will be solely for graduate students.  I’m attaching a copy of the paper and including an abstract of the talk below.
ABSTRACT
This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising
formal imperialism from the repertoire of global power. Most studies related to this
question address why older empires fell and nation-states emerged. This essay instead
asks: why did great powers not colonize or recolonize territory in the mid-twentieth
century and afterwards? Using the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal in 1956,
including the reactions of the United States to it, as an exemplary event, the essay argues
hat the relational approach embedded in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu offers a
useful lens for arriving at an explanation. It shows that as colonialism generated
anticolonial responses in the colonial world – or what Bourdieu would call the
“challengers” offering a new “heterodoxy”, the global political field was altered,
changing the “rules of the game” by turning anticolonial nationalism into a potentially
new form of capital. This in turn constrained the European empires and the United States.
As part of their struggle to maintain their dominant positions in the field, they were
forced to reconsider their strategies of rule and so adopted a stance of promoting
anticolonial nationalism. With the new changed field brought on by the agency of
nationalists, colonialism had become a liability rather than a source of
strength.

Bio:

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in Asian Studies and New England & American Studies at Boston University. His interdisciplinary work examines global social formations, empires, colonialism, postcolonial thought and social theory. His first sole authored book, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in Puerto Rico and the Philippines under US Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2008), won the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book from the American Sociological Association and was a Finalist for the Philippines National Book Award). His most recent book Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011), won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and was one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles” in 2012.