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Rodríguez is thus concerned with the next phase of empire in the isthmus, the nebulous empire of globalization as first put forth by Hardt and Negri in Empire, as refined in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and as subsequently challenged by their detractors and interlocutors—including Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (2004), Gopal Balakrishnan and Stanley Aronowitz in Debating Empire (2003), and William I. Robinson in Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (2003). A growing body of isthmian literature—works by Uriel Quesada (Costa Rica), Claudia Hernandez (El Salvador), and Franz Galich (Nicaragua)—documents the crises faced by Hardt and Negri’s multitude, in isthmian works reread as the vogelfrei (without rights) masses of dispossessed Central Americans, hindered in their flight by the respective agendas of the Monroe Doctrine and (later) of neoliberalism—two cornerstones of empire building in the region.
Queering Empire
The last part of this study explores the trope of intimacy, specifically in the context of queer sexuality, in order to reimagine the colonized subject and further crisscross postcolonial studies and queer theory—two sites of unequal power relationships (Zabus). New readings of canonical modernist texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1900), and the critical browning of queer studies through a reexamination of texts from India and Sri Lanka demonstrate that sexual dissidence has a voice in the building of nations in a postcolonial age, an age that cannot afford to ignore the secret interstices between nations or between genders.
Reading homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Patrick Mullen suggests that a violent homophobic epistemology legitimizes and enables a sanitized imperialist historical narration in the text. Additionally, he examines Conrad’s historical relationship with queer Irish radical Roger Casement, to whom Conrad promised a copy of Nostromo; Mullen’s reading of the relationship between the two men thus marks the