In their blog, Modern America: Power and Politics of an Empire, spring 2014 students Sujaya Desai ’14, Maansi Vohra ’15, Najma Yakob ’14, and Bartosz Zerebecki ’15 set out to find the colonial in our supposedly post-colonial world. Through discussion, their tumblr and its followers interrogate the concept of imperialism and track its persistence in today’s world. Their project is framed by a few different theories of empire, including Said’s concept of the imperialization of culture, Hardt and Negri’s Empire via global capitalism, Catherine Lutz’s military bases, and Julian Go’s descriptive theory of the patterns of empire. The end result is a collection of engaging essays, ramblings, quotations, videos, memes, and links to other resources–including other blogs, books, and presentations–all of which touch on imperialism in American domestic and foreign policy.

On top of their blog, these students conducted a survey on people’s perceptions of imperialism. They polled about 80 people aged 20-30 of all citizenships, making use of social networks to reach people not only around Brown but around the world. Nearly all of their questions had multiple answers and participants could choose many among those answers. Questions ranged from simply defining empire to whether empires serve a purpose in today’s world. Many of the blog’s essays discuss the answers they got. The survey and the blog together make a great resource!