LATE-STAGE AMERICAN EMPIRE?

2025 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association
November 20-22, 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Registration Opens May 1st

Since the end of the Cold War, we have heard a constant refrain about the end of the American Century, the end of history, and more recently, the end of the U.S. empire. At the same time, the institutions in which we work are changing, as many eliminate the tenure-track, downsize liberal arts programs, target our knowledge production, attack our dissent, and outsource shared governance to paid consultants. “America,” as an object, has been thoroughly stripped of its exceptionalism and is bankrolling a genocide, while the forces of fascism and authoritarianism have risen across the political spectrum. Moreover, climate change may have passed a tipping point, accelerating environmental catastrophe. What kind of America is invoked in American Studies and where/how is America studied? Are we living through an historical conjuncture characterized by late-stage American empire?

We invite discussion at our 2025 conference of what American Studies is, and can be, in this moment of ongoing catastrophe and accelerating devolution. Are we experiencing the late-stage of empire and how might this era inform American Studies, broadly conceived? What sorts of violent eruptions characterize this stage of imperial transformation and through what methods, questions, theories (and from where) can we locate resources for meaning, imagine new forms of sociality, and articulate new modes of knowledge production? What possible futures do our methods enable or foreclose at the present conjuncture? How might Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Ethnic Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies offer critical resources for understanding the present conjuncture?

Rather than lamenting an American Studies or empire in perpetual crisis, we intend for this call to serve as an invitation to imagine an American Studies otherwise, from its peripheries, from the standpoint of elsewhere. Contributors might view the world-changing moment we’re thinking and living through as a violent, terminal phase. They may also view it as creative ground for new intellectual and political possibilities. We call on our members, and our chapters, committees and caucuses, to critically engage with ways that our current geopolitical conjuncture, the late stage of the American empire (as well as its powerful durability), requires critical reflection on our methods, our theories, and the gravitational center of our disciplines.

We will engage these questions and others in a context of imperial violence, colonial relations, climate catastrophe, as well as anti-racist, anti-colonial, and Indigenous resistance. Puerto Rico, our conference host, encounters daily the consequences and limits of the American empire, as well as the violent displacements caused by climate/military/cultural imperialism. Puerto Rico is also a place of insurgent knowledge formation and creative worldmaking where Indigenous, Black, and Latinx anticolonial analysis, culture, and praxis offer resources for imagining post- or counter-American American Studies. Puerto Rico forces us to confront the intimacies of empire and settler colonialism, and requires us to think with questions of decolonization, from Puerto Rico to Palestine, to Hawai‘i, to Haiti, to Congo, to Sudan.