US Imperialism and Anti-Colonial Resistance
(Los Angeles, October 8-9, 2027)
Online Conference will be on October 2-3, 2027)
Submit Here by January 10, 2027
From Palestine and Iran to Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States has exercised its imperial power through occupation, dispossession, sanctions, interventions, and genocidal wars, often in alliance with other imperial and colonial powers and actors. These practices are not new: they extend a colonial matrix of power inaugurated in 1492 and sustained through slavery, settler colonialism, and extractivism. At the same time, peoples, movements, and communities across the Global South, as well as Black, Indigenous, and other diasporic communities in the Global North, are challenging imperial and colonial structures by imagining and enacting alternative forms of sovereignty, solidarity, care, relationship to land and territory, and collective liberation. Yemen and Iran are also playing a vital role in contesting US imperialism by choking its geopolitically and economically strategic points.
The 2027 Decolonial Conference invites scholars, organizers, artists, educators, organizations, collectives, and movements to critically examine anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance in the present conjuncture and in their long historical formation. We are particularly interested in work that interrogates the relationship between U.S. imperial power, Zionism, militarism, racial capitalism, deterritorialization, dispossession and territorial control and the ongoing colonization of peoples and territories. What does anti-Zionist resistance reveal about the structures of empire, occupation, and racialized dispossession? How does Palestinian anti-colonial thought and practice function not only as a case but as a source of theory and political reimagining? How should we understand the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran and its broader military and geopolitical ambitions in other regions? What role do other powers play geopolitically and economically (China, Russia, European states, Gulf states, regional powers)? How are these projects connected to the reconfiguration of global power and the emergence of a more contested, multipolar world? Does multipolarity open internationalist possibilities and what is to be done if it does not?
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, with its long history (1823, the Roosevelt Corollary, the Cold War, the School of the Americas), signals at the longue durée of US imperialism and its hemispheric dominance through military power, economic coercion, resource extraction, and political intervention (as seen, e.g., in Venezuela, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, but also Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, and the territories still under European rule, such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Curaçao). What new forms of resistance are emerging in response? What movements have remained, matured and transformed beyond the longue durée of the 20th century? What can we learn from histories of anti-colonial struggle, revolutionary movements, Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, internationalism, and transnational solidarity, including their failures, internal hierarchies, and exclusions? What does anti-imperialist praxis mean within settler-colonial states? What are the existing tensions and ways to work through them?
Building upon our first conference, we are also interested in how education and knowledge production function as technologies of imperial domination and as sites of anti-colonial resistance in material terms. Knowledge, in other words, is material when we consider how it materializes itself into technologies of violence (e.g., AI and drones) and dehumanizing practices. Conversely, we also witness the importance of Indigenous knowledge and technologies in creating the material conditions to resist imperial wars. How do universities, schools, curricula, research institutions, media, archives, and intellectual traditions reproduce and unsettle imperial subjectivities and the coloniality of being (who counts as fully human)? How does counterinsurgency operate through the production, regulation, and circulation of knowledge (including knowledge that proclaims itself to be critical and radical)? How might education, understood in broad terms, become a practice of political formation, insurgent knowledge, collective memory, and liberation? What modes of organizing and solidarity networks have emerged in this moment of increasing police violence, surveillance, criminalization of protests, and deportations? What can it tell us about the coloniality experienced and fiercely resisted by our ancestors (Indigenous, African, Palestinian, and others)? How is gender-based violence central to the modern face of coloniality, and how are gender, sexuality, and the body constitutive of the modern/colonial system? How do women, trans, queer, and dissident people, and communitarian, Indigenous, Black, and decolonial feminisms, theorize and lead resistance, not only suffer violence? How is anti-Blackness fundamental to racial capitalism and imperialism?
We welcome proposals (300-500 words) that practice, theorize, historicize, document, and enact anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance across geographical contexts. Proposals may be individual papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, artistic interventions, testimonies, ceremonies, community assemblies, screenings, and other forms of collective engagement.
Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Anti-imperialism and anti-colonial resistance (e.g., refer to questions posed by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism)
Indigenous resistance in settler colonial and postcolonial states
BDS and beyond
Palestine, anti-Zionism, and settler colonialism
A dying civilization and empire (Césaire) and/or an increasingly destructive and fortified one?
U.S. imperialism and other powers (China, Russia, EU, Gulf states, regional powers)
Borders, migration regimes, and the colonial present of Europe and North America
Anti-ICE and anti-carceral organizing
Imperial boomerang and/or imperial/colonial entanglements
Self-determination, armed resistance, and the spectre of the terrorist
“Terrorism” and the repression of social movements and delegitimization of liberation struggles
The Axis of Resistance
Active solidarity and militant resistance
NGOs and the co-optation of movements
Anticolonialism and the National Question
Electoralism in a time of genocide and imperial wars
AI, algorithms, and imperial violence, data extraction, mineral supply chains, and digital colonialism
Gender-based violence as a pillar of modernity/coloniality
Climate Catastrophes and Climate Coloniality (extractivism, green colonialism, "energy transition" (lithium, copper), territory-body, relational ontologies)
The geopolitical reconfiguration of imperial power (multipolarity and coloniality)
The Monroe Doctrine and U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean
Militarism, occupation, sanctions, and political intervention
Counterinsurgency and knowledge production
Scholasticide as counterinsurgency
Indigenous technologies and militant resistance
Combative and insurgent decolonial thought and praxis
Education, curriculum, and imperial power
Universities, academic freedom, and epistemic repression
Coloniality of knowledge, scholasticide, and epistemic violence
Indigenous sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle
The Black radical and Afro-diasporic tradition, Maroon histories, Afro-Indigenous relations, internationalism, and liberation
Racial capitalism, extraction, and empire
Popular education and political education
Transnational solidarity and anti-imperialist organizing
Art, culture, memory, and anti-colonial resistance
Oral history, counterarchives, decolonial recordkeeping, and the rewriting of historical memory
Healing as combative decolonial praxes
Abstract submission deadline: January 10, 2027 (submit here)
Notification of decision: March 15, 2027
Conference dates: Online, October 2-3 & In-person, October 8–9, 2027
Location: Los Angeles