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About the talk:
This talk builds on Lubin's book, Never-Ending War on Terror, by analyzing the War on Terror as a geopolitical conflict as well as a formation of U.S. imperial culture.  In doing so, Lubin situates the War on Terror in a long history of U.S. imperial and settler violence while also considering how this history was reviewed and extended at the end of the ‘American century.’  Post-Cold War imperial culture, Lubin argues, should be read in the context of what Paul Gilroy has called, ‘imperial melancholia,’ a cultural formation that imagines a presumably lost era of imperial benevolence and purity in the service of an imperial state violence justified as necessary and defensive.  In this context, torture, state securitization, domestic and international counterinsurgency, and drone warfare are understood as defensive postures required to vanquish an imagined existential threat.

About the speaker:
Alex Lubin is a professor of African American studies at Penn State University. His most recent books are Never-Ending War on Terror (UC Press, 2021) and the co-edited volume, Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso, 2017).