This course traces the entanglements of race, gender and sexuality that animate critical discourse of the United States as an ongoing heteropatriarchal, imperial and settler colonial project. With an eye for the contexts which produce them, we will look at the emergence of political coalitions like ‘Third World,’ ‘women of color,’ ‘Indigenous,’ and ‘Asian American Pacific Islander’ and the different tactics they use to address systems of power. How does the past inform us in the present? Can thinking about the U.S. as an empire or a settler colony help us understand how we came to believe that assimilation and belonging to the nation are modes of equality and justice?