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ABSTRACT.
In this article Roland Sintos Coloma argues for the relevance of empire as an analytical category in educational research. He points out the silence in mainstream studies of education on the subject of empire, the various interpretive approaches to deploying empire as an analytic, and the importance of indigeneity in research on empire and education. Coloma examines three awardwinning books, Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957, John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End, and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, in order to delineate the heuristic spectrum of the use of empire in educational research. These texts are put in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of American, postcolonial, race/ethnic, and indigenous studies where questions of empire have received considerable attention. Ultimately, mobilizing empire as an analytical category will enable researchers, policymakers, and educators to establish new connections and dispute long-standing views about discursive, structural, and affective dynamics at local, national, and global levels.
Within the past dozen years, there has been tremendous scholarly and public interest in examining the formation, development, and activities of the United States as an empire.1 This interest has been due, in large part, to the tragic events that took place on September 11, 2001, which precipitated the call for critical analyses of U.S. global and domestic affairs, especially in relation to groups and societies that it deems as its racial and religious others. At the global level, the analysis has primarily focused on the ways in which the U.S. has exerted its political, military, and economic power in order to assert its international superiority and authority. At the domestic level, it has mostly centered on the ways in which the U.S. has marshaled its cultural might in order to establish social norms and regulations to discipline the populace.
While 9/11 and its aftermath have prompted the most recent interrogation of the United States as an empire, the field of postcolonial studies has offered many of the intellectual tools for such investigations.2 The field has mobilized interpretive frameworks to scrutinize the structural, discursive, and affective dimensions of empire in varying scales, ranging from the local and national to the regional...