Decolonization, Imperial Culture, and the Politics of U.S. History

This paper will attempt to understand why the fundamental influences of the global process of decolonization and transnational, anti-colonial networks remain, for the most part, on the margin of the U.S. history. In the process, it will seek to unearth the politics of U.S. history and explicate how an ongoing imperial culture prevents U.S. history from openly integrating decolonization into its meta-narrative. This Orientalist culture, which continues to culturally colonize and dehumanize decolonization and its actors, facilitates both the production of U.S. exceptionalism, as well as the production of consent for contemporary U.S. interventions in the so-called global South.