U.S. Imperialism, Extraction, and Ecocritical Art Histories

Ecocritical art histories have expanded over the past two decades, with studies attuned to diverse geographies and temporalities exploring how art and ecology connect with extraction, politics, economics, technology, law, and more. However, art historians have been slow to examine the ways in which U.S. imperialism operates in tandem with extraction and how visual productions uphold, complicate, or challenge such dual operations. As art historian Maggie M. Cao has explained, imperialism “is a fraught term in the United States” as it clashes with the nation’s self-fashioning “as a republic” (Panorama, Spring 2020).

This panel seeks papers that address the entangled terrain of U.S. imperialism and extraction in histories of American art broadly defined. Geographically, we consider the U.S. Empire to include its claims to water, land, and air across the Americas and at sites throughout the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including military bases beyond and within the state’s borders on occupied Indigenous lands. We encourage proposals that approach the U.S. as a formal imperial power in its territorial and ideological expansion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This panel also welcomes papers that consider how the U.S.’s informal imperial networks—defined by capitalism and an extractive economy that facilitates the removal and flow of human and extrahuman bodies, food, energy, and raw materials across the world—have shaped and been shaped by visual and material culture. The co-chairs are committed to anticolonial work and strive to foster discussions that interrogate U.S. imperialism and extraction to add new insights to ecocritical art histories.