Narratives, Nationalisms and New Dystopias

February 10-11, 2023 | In-person at UC Irvine & live-streamed

Pre-register for the in-person conference (lunch order): https://bit.ly/empire-resurgent-2023

Pre-register to live-stream the conference on Zoom: https://bit.ly/empire-resurgent-zoom

Presented by UCI’s Forum for the Academy and the Public

We ostensibly live in a postcolonial age, but imperialist behaviors, broadly defined, have not gone away. On the contrary, they seem to be manifesting themselves in all sorts of contexts. The U.S. and the international community continue to intervene in Haiti and elsewhere in the hemisphere; China is asserting control in Hong Kong and presiding over a “soft empire” in many parts of the globe; and, of course, Putin is attempting to reconquer Ukraine and revive the old tsarist empire. Meanwhile, the residues of European empires persist, and the EU and NATO have imperialist aspects as well. This conference will consider all of these issues, as well as the impact of supranational empires such as tech, finance, and energy.

The keynote speaker on Friday, Feb. 10 is Albanian-born political theorist Lea Ypi, author of the award-winning memoir, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History. A panel responding to the keynote will feature journalist and historian Adam Hochschild, Stanford historian and public intellectual Priya Satia, Nigerian novelist and poet Helon Habila, and Yale legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn.

The luncheon speaker on Saturday. Feb. 11 will be Jonathan Katz, prize-winning journalist and author of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.

Art by Edouard Duval Carrié