Empire and Exception in Amy Kaplan’s Works, and Beyond

“Empire and Exception in Amy Kaplan’s Works, and Beyond” explores the relationship between empire and the concept of legal exception in Amy Kaplan’s works. Kaplan (1953-2020) was an influential critic and thinker in the field of American Studies. She is known primarily for her edited volume Cultures of US Imperialism (Duke UP 1994) and her monograph The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard UP 2005). This paper revisits both of these texts and her last book Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Harvard UP 2018) and re-examines her fierce scrutiny of American exceptionalism and US cultures of Imperialism. The paper reads Kaplan’s contribution to the study of imperialism through the lens of exceptionalism by juxtaposing her work with the works by four other thinkers of Empire and Exceptionalism: Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben. The paper traces the shift from culture to law in the critical discourses of U.S. imperialism and argues that a critique of empire needs to take into account, to recall Agamben’s apt formulation, the “permanent state of exception” that he believes we all live in. By referring to two U.S. Supreme court cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Downes v. Bidwell (1901), the paper contends, however, that even though legal exceptionalism is at the heart of imperialism which includes only through exclusion or occupies only to leave the colonized space unincorporated, yet, since the exception is closely related to Sovereignty, a wholesale critique of exceptionalism that we find in many otherwise astute critiques of U.S. imperialism might be counterproductive as it would unwittingly boost the regimes of globalization or universalism.