Candace Lukasik

“Considering the explosion of American-styled beach towns, the post-Arab Spring push for the expansion of American franchises in Egypt, the focus on American clothing brands, and the overall dream of immigration to the U.S. by way of the Green Card Lottery, ‘where is America not?'"

The Ordinary Affects of U.S. Empire

Empire is pieced together as lived condition, opening up space to reconsider imperial thought by way of its affective dispersion — empire emerges through a differential of power, not geography. Thinking about U.S. empire as a scholarly field of inquiry and lived condition, then, allows us to follow the transgressions of sovereignty; or how U.S. imperialism seeps into the blood of other polities, cultures, and communities that are not formally part of the United States (as state, colony, or otherwise). Transgressing sovereignty is not the only form of U.S. imperialism. Rather, if we think about the intersection of empire and religion through material interests — in the extraction of natural resources and labor, as well as the extraction of cultural and economic distinctiveness and difference — imperial formations like the United States control and transform even the most ordinary movements, preferences, affective commitments, and forms of community. This presentation will reflect on the ordinary affects of empire—to observe how empire is immanent; not a distant web of power—through vignettes from my fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States. While at times exacerbating such problems, the U.S. has also offered refuge from them–for example, in the form of migration from, in my case, Coptic Christians’ minority condition in Egypt to the potentiality of being part of a Christian majority in the United States — the absorption of their difference into a hegemonic episteme. This presentation will experimentally explore affective forms of comparison, unfolding the ordinary affects of American hegemony.

Bio:

Candace Lukasik is a sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on the intersections of transnational migration, religion, race, and empire. Her first book Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire, ethnographically examines how the American politicization of Middle Eastern Christians has shaped patterns of migration and transnational minority subjectivities.