Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture is important to me, for two particular reasons.Footnote ¹ The first is that it appeared at an exciting moment of change in American studies, one Kaplan herself led through a series of fine publications. This coincided with a particularly formative period of my own professional development, doubtless adding to the impact her writing had on me. Second, several years after it was published I had the good fortune to meet and spend time with her, making the book and its author inseparable in my memory.

The Anarchy of Empire was Kaplan’s third important publication in a short space of time. Along with Donald Pease, she coedited the groundbreaking collection Cultures of United States Imperialism (1994). This volume countered long-standing paradigms of exceptionalism and nationalism governing scholarship in American studies and revealed a different kind of US American story, foregrounding empire and its complex entanglements. Reimagining US culture through this lens was an extraordinarily powerful shift. Four years later, in a groundbreaking 1998 special edition of American Literature titled No More Separate Spheres!, Kaplan published a remarkable essay that deepened her analysis of the connections between culture and imperialism and won her the Norman Forster Prize for the best essay in American Literature. A version of this article would become the opening chapter of her 2002 book. The special edition challenged a then dominant critical archetype which had produced significant feminist scholarship. Representing a productive field reorientation, the volume offered possibilities for new scholarship that were rapidly taken up by others. It contained contributions from key thinkers – many of them women. The Preface was by Cathy Davidson and there were articles by Lawrence Buell, Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, José Aranda, You-me Park and Gayle Wald, and Lauren Berlant. The bold two-word title of Kaplan’s contribution, simply “Manifest Domesticity,” immediately signalled its author’s critical intelligence. The simplicity and lack of adornment of the title make it utterly memorable. She joined two categories previously thought to be quite distinct: manifest destiny and domesticity. For those of us who struggle with the question whether our titles should or shouldn’t contain colons, or whether and how they can introduce chronology without being overly restrictive, her daring was revelatory.

Four years later, The Anarchy of Empire was published, and to acclaim. Its title drew upon a 1920 poem by W. E. B. Du Bois, published in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, that, as Kaplan argues, challenges “the traditional understanding of imperialism as a one-way imposition of power in distant colonies … [calling] attention instead to ambiguities and contradictions of imperial relations in the formation of a national culture” (1). She revealed something that was hiding in plain sight, as she repeatedly did in all her work. The first paragraph of her Introduction makes an argument that she expands upon throughout the book: “The idea of the nation as home, I argue, is inextricable from the political, economic, and cultural movements of empire, movements that both erect and unsettle the ever-shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign, between ‘at home’ and abroad” (1). Once again, the confidence and simplicity of the manner in which she makes her claim is noteworthy.

Kaplan went on to become the president of the American Studies Association, and in this role, too, she continued to teach, inspire and challenge. I vividly remember the impact her work had on scholars of American studies internationally. She prompted us all to ask questions of our own, and the sense of excitement that her writing created was extraordinary. Jet-lagged at a US conference in a period when her work was having a significant response, I kept myself alert by listening out for the almost inevitable moment at which she was quoted, in one of the many panel presentations I attended. It was precisely the opposite of counting sheep, and kept me awake rather than lulling me to sleep.

Several years after the book’s publication I was working at the University of Leeds and teaching both an undergraduate survey course on twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature, and an undergraduate option course titled “Danger and Domesticity.” I was also the principal investigator on an AHRC grant and one of the scholars I was able to invite to Leeds as part of the funding was Amy Kaplan. Her earlier work was foundational to the thinking we were exploring on our project, but in addition she had recently published another important essay in which she had challenged the coinage of the term “Homeland Security.” In “Homeland Insecurities: Transformations of Language and Space” she once more confronted and interrogated an increasingly dominant and pervasive critical coinage. The prospect of having her speak to students, the contributors to the research project, and a wider public audience was exciting.

I was nervous about meeting her but needn’t have been. She was delightful and easy company and asked and answered many questions about work, life, politics, family and food. I was greatly looking forward to hearing her give her lecture and had booked a beautiful room next to the library that opened out from the Parkinson Building, the University’s iconic centrepiece, rather than a regular lecture hall. She and I went to the room well before the lecture, and there were already at least forty people there. While she prepared herself to speak, the room continued to fill and we had to get more chairs. And then more still. The eventual audience was about a hundred strong and I remember the sense of expectation and excitement as I introduced her and as she stood up to speak. She was serious and measured, behaving as if this was the first occasion she had delivered the lecture, though she had probably given it many times before. She spoke with great professionalism, and respect for her audience, and was also entirely without pomposity or ego. She vividly brought together the literary, the cultural and the political, carrying her authority and integrity with grace. This resonated with her listeners. After her lecture she answered many, many, questions from the floor. Though I eventually had to intervene because we had run out of time, she continued to answer questions from the students (especially women) who went to speak to her in person, crowding around her to thank her for coming. She was willing to answer all of their questions, though she must have been tired. This generosity reminded me that in the Acknowledgments to The Anarchy of Empire she wrote about her appreciation of the bravery that prompted her (then young) daughter Rose to ask a question at one of her lectures. It was clear that she obviously wanted to give her listeners in Leeds enough time to ask anything they wanted, knowing that it can be difficult to formulate queries in public settings.

In the days and weeks that followed, students repeatedly told me that listening to her speak was one of the most significant and memorable moments of their intellectual lives. She made them see why what we were all studying was so important, and how much it could reveal about the world in which we were living. She had reached back into history to reimagine the present and future, urging them to do the same. They explained that her visit was inspirational not just for the intellectual content of the lecture, but because her example made them feel brave enough – empowered enough – to ask their own questions and to know that they were developing the tools to answer them too, rather than accepting what others told them. She made them understand the imperative to embrace that responsibility both within and beyond the classroom, which is what the best teaching always aims for.