 Our third speaker is Basam Siddiqui. Basam is originally from Karachi, Pakistan. He is a PhD student in English and Language Literature. Today, he will be speaking on post-colonial aphasia, America's Imperial Miss Education. Basam, come take the stage. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was quite a photogenic individual. And a lot of the ways that we remember him is through his photographs and images. What is your favorite image of Dr. King? Here's mine. The image shows Dr. King and other participants in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. And what's interesting about this image is that they are all wearing Hawaiian lays. Why Hawaiian lays, one may ask, and what is the significance of that? Well, that's a very good question, and let me explain. We usually think of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s as something that was relegated to the margins of mainland US. We know about the end of segregation. We know about the provision of voting rights to African-Americans in 1965. But rarely do we think of the inclusion of Hawaii and Alaska into the Union in 1959 as part of that civil rights movement. But Dr. King did, hence, delays. And yet, some people would say, well, Hawaiian statehood and civil rights on the mainland is kind of comparing apples to oranges. How can you lump them together? But Dr. King saw the liberation of the African-American community on the mainland as intimately connected with that of several communities worldwide. I want us to think of Hawaiian statehood and civil rights as parts of a global decolonial movement. And parts of that were, of course, most famously the independence and partition of India from the British Empire in 47, independence of Algeria from the French Empire in the 60s. But it also included the fall of a much lesser known, much smaller, and much shorter-lived US empire. This is the map of the US that we are all familiar with. And usually, it will include Hawaii and Alaska on the sides. But even then, that representation is incomplete, if not entirely incorrect, from an historical standpoint. This is a more interesting and correct representation. So in 1898, the year that we annexed Hawaii and the same year when we fought the Spanish-American War and took control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, up until 1946, when the Philippines got its independence, scholars agree that the US had an empire. And there were many other offshore territories which aren't here labeled here, such as Samoa, Guam, Bikini Atoll, the Virgin Islands, which we still hold. And of course, this empire was nowhere near the British or the French-in-sizer population. But historians say that it came close. One historian says that it was the fifth largest by the time that Pearl Harbor happened in 1941. Another scholar estimates that the Philippines had a population of 8 million people in 1898 itself, which was roughly equal to the 8.8 million African-American people on the mainland. But these numbers goes to show that even as there were people fighting for the liberty and their self-determination on the mainland, there were these others in these offshore territories ignored. And all of these territories have their own complex and vast histories, which I cannot go into all of them. But the histories of Hawaii and the Philippines are demonstrative of the three prongs of my larger argument, that first, there has been a complete and utter erasure of colonial history from the textbooks of America in both colleges and high schools. The second is that any optimism regarding American exceptionalism is entirely misplaced. We are not exceptional. We have often looked to the British, the Spanish, and the French empires for inspiration on how to govern our newly colonized people. And lastly, our current forays into Asian and or Muslim countries is not something out of the blue and recent, but in fact has historical precedent. So before I move on, I am going to test how miseducated you all are. Raise your hands if you have heard of the phrase the white man's burden. Keep your hands raised if you know that that phrase comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling. And again, keep your hands raised if you know that that poem was written for the United States on the conquest of the Philippines. So for the vast 99% of you who don't know this, let me educate you. So the ardently imperialist British author, Rudyard Kipling, wrote the White Man's Burden, the US, and the Philippine Islands in 1899, in which he welcomed the Americans to the coveted club of empire dumb and told them to civilize the Filipinos, their new caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child. So I'll give you a brief background on the American Philippine War of 1899. The Filipinos have been fighting the Spaniards for quite some time. And when the American Spanish war broke out, they thought that the Americans would actually help them win their self-determination and throughout the Spaniards. That did not happen. Surprise, surprise. We stabbed them in the back and decided to stay. And of course the Filipinos for their self-determination started an insurgency which lasted till 1902. And the Americans responded in a violent and disproportionate fashion. So entire villages were burned, women were raped, they introduced the water cure, which is an early version of what we today call waterboarding. And most controversially of all, they established reconcentration camps. It seems that the turn of the 20th century was the age of the concentration camp and the Americans got their inspiration from the Spaniards, who had them in Cuba in 1896 around the same time. And from the British in South Africa who made concentration camps for the Boers in the Second South African War. We know about the Allied forces liberating the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau and others at the end of World War II. Little do we know that the Allies themselves pioneered the concentration camps in colonial settings. But the example of the Philippines gets even more interesting. It was actually the first time that the US actually started to govern a predominantly Muslim population. So the south of the Philippine archipelago had an independent sultanate called the Moros. And they resisted the Americans from 1899 up till 1914. It is the second longest war that the Americans have fought against the Muslim nation after our current war in Afghanistan, which is actually the longest war we've ever fought, period. So, on the topic of Muslim and Asian countries, let's address the elephant in the room, shall we? How does Iran figure here? Well, before earlier this year when commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike, Iran had been a target of regime change. So after 1946 and during the Cold War, the Americans did not need overseas territories. They worked with a vast network of military bases across the globe, which still exists today. And they resorted to regime change and proxy wars to fight the communists, right? So I would like you to pay attention to two countries on this table, Iran and Vietnam. So in 1953, the CIA with the British MI6 toppled the democratically-elected government of Muhammad Mossadik in what was called Operation Ajax and the legacies of which continue today. And then two years later in 1955, President Eisenhower officially started the involvement of the Americans in Vietnam, our most destructive war today. On Vietnam, I would like us to go back to Dr. King. So, exactly to one year to the day before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King made a speech in New York called Beyond Vietnam, in which he categorically condemned the invasion of that country. And that alienated him from a lot of people, from the civil rights establishment itself, from the media, from the government, with famously LBJ rescinding his invitation to the White House. And because this ostracization of Dr. King and his anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist legacy is entirely expunged from our national imaginary, just like the US Empire that he was fighting against. Why? Is this the case of post-colonial amnesia, where we have actually forgotten our empire and Dr. King's fight against it? I don't think so. It's a case not of post-colonial amnesia but of post-colonial aphasia, a term that scholar Anne Stoller uses in her book, Giresse, in the context of France, where she says that aphasia is the inability to name something or speak of something as that. And I think that is the very reason that the US can self-righteously in the name of liberty and democracy, invade other countries. It is the disavowal of empire, which produces imperial behavior. So what do I want you as my audience to do with this information? I have some book recommendations, which are also my references for this talk. So, How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Imravar for a popular audience, but very readable. And the second is A.G. Hopkins' American Empire, a global history, excellent here, more scholarly, but still very readable. Find these books in a bookstore, in a library. Read them with attention. Discuss them with your friends and family. Really sit with the history that you read there, because fighting empire currently, it starts with naming names, and naming starts with reading. Thank you.