No abstract

Dominant conceptualizations of the United States as a nation-state have recently given way to greater understandings of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. However, notions of U.S. empire may still work to naturalize settler colonialism if viewed in isolation from the expansiveness of what has been considered U.S. territory. In this review article, I outline three dominant understandings of U.S. empire and describe how each reifies the myth of the U.S. as a "nation-state." The U.S. does not simply have an empire. It is an empire. I then review helpful insights concerning processes of rule within empire-states including from postcolonial sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and gender and sexuality. Insights from critical Indigenous studies offer a way forward for research that analyzes the rule of settler colonial and empire-states alongside the politics of race and racism. As theorized by Indigenous feminisms in Oceania, racism also operates through possessive processes that integrate peoples and ways of living into state logics and mechanisms of rule. Finally, I argue that sociology committed to addressing racism must further grapple with the reality that the United States is an empire-state. As such, we must more closely analyze the state and statist politics as key producers of White supremacy today.

The history of humanism is intertwined with empire and racism. Many in sociology are aware of the significant contributions of Sylvia Wynter in our understanding of how modernity has shaped what it means to be human. ‘Man,’ Wynter argues, was never more that the European bourgeois man of the colonial world. Colonial conceptions of humanity have largely excluded ways of being and living that resist and refuse global empires. I argue that the differences between those who lived under state rule and those whose politics were illegible to European colonists became part of what we now think of as race. Colonists conflated the human with a certain kind of colonial subject, and later, the favored White citizen-subject and fellow colonist of an empire-state. In contemplating this journal’s title and mission for a humanist sociology, I argue that ‘society’ its 20th and 21st century articulations have often stood in for Man in the Wynterian sense. U.S. Sociology promoted ‘society’ as both an object of inquiry and a cognate for the colonial state. As such, sociology as the study of ‘society’ contained a specifically statist bent. Finally, this essay ends by offering examples of anticolonial humanist sociology that nurtures a more egalitarian genres of the human for the future.