Volume 22, Issue 3 (2000) Imperial Disclosures Part I

From the Introduction "Imperial Disclosures"

This special issue of Discourse explores colonialist, neo-colonialist and imperial paradigms in countries that are or have been under the political jurisdiction of Spain, Portugal, or the United States. In an effort to avoid simplistic dichotomies, we specifically looked for critical perspectives that explored both the colonial and/or impe- rial past of these countries and current internal/domestic imperial and colonizing processes (at the political, economic, linguistic, and cultural levels). The essays represented here seek to uncover, from many different critical angles, the legal and epistemological framework of the new supranational empires as well as the historical amnesia and erasures characteristic of colonialist and imperialist traditions. "We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign and no memories," wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.