Week 5- Rachel Ibrahim

Rachel Ibrahim

Week 5

Section A03

This weeks reading were both quite shocking in different ways. While “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State” by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira was much more relevant and can be directly linked to this week’s theme of the Imperial University, Darrell Y. Hamamoto's "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence" was a much more removed and darker subject, but nevertheless still an important study the Asian American cause and how American Imperialism has an overarching impact.

Being a college student, I very much appreciated the chance to learn about the Imperial University and how it directly impacts my life. The reading really exposed how controlled American universities are by the economic and political agendas of United States Imperialism. I believe it is generally thought that colleges are a place of political freedom and cultural diversity, but this reading proved that when it comes down to it, universities are just another piece to America’s ever expanding colonial reach. The ‘freedom’ we associate with higher education can be seen in the form of protests, freedom of speech, the ability for students to express cultural differences, and the diversity of thinking among peers. Yet, this ‘freedom’ is constantly being oppressed by the University’s white, corporal, political and economic agenda. The reading talked the University’s response about things like the pepper spray incident and the normalization of suppressing student views all while pushing their own ideologies onto students attending American universities. It is important to acknowledge this type of Imperialistic behavior in order to realize that there needs to be a change and that change must come from us, the students directly affected.

The second reading for this week didn’t necessarily detail the Imperial University but it did play into the idea of American Imperialism and our attacks on Asian countries-- primarily the Vietnam war. Not only did the reading expose the horrors that America imposed upon Vietnam but it also detailed how our ‘normalized’ view of murder can be directly linked to racial issues such as the serial and mass killings of Asians and Asian Americans. I think a lot of times when we think about serial killers, we deem them as insane and write them off as a select few, yet, this reading dove into how race actually plays a much bigger role than we realize. To see how American Imperialism and our involvement in Vietnam impacted racial motivated killers was quite disturbing and just another terrible consequence of American Imperialistic views.

Question: If America did not have such ambitious Imperialistic motivations, would there be as big of an impact on its citizens in the case of racial murders? Is this type of murder intrinsic or a learned behavior?

References:

Hamamoto, D. Y. (2003). Empire of death and the plague of civil violence. In Boggs, C. (Ed.), Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (pp. 272-296). New York, New York: Routledge.

Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Imperialism. (n.d.). Retrieved April 30, 2017, from http://www.nuttyhistory.com/imperialism.html