This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

‘What kind of American are you?’ is a line from the 2024 movie Civil War. It will hit Latin Americans in a particularly powerful way – as one of the stars of the film, Wagner Moura, admitted during an interview when asked about the scene in which his character is confronted with a trigger-happy militia man with a keen interest in geography and demographics: “‘What kind of American are you’ is something that really strikes me, as someone that is not from here. I’m an American citizen, too, but I speak with an accent and I’m Brazilian. (…) In the end, when we wrapped, really, I laid down in the grass and cried for 15 minutes. It says something about being a Latino in this country, and it was a really strong scene for me (Weintraub and Jones 2024, para. 27).”

Coming out of the movie theater after watching the new blockbuster, the same question kept popping up in my head. I am definitely not the right kind of American in the eyes of the murderous inquisitor, and if I were in that situation, admitting I come from Chile would have bought me a one-way ticket to the mass grave where the one guy from Hong Kong also ends up. I am a Latino, and I have also been a Latino in that country, just like Moura. And although I am not a citizen, I am technically American, because I was born in the continent bearing that name. There are many peoples and many states scattered across that gigantic landmass stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Some of them are united, some divided. But they are all American.

It feels only natural to dovetail our reflections on the British Empire with a chapter dedicated to one of the most salient continuations of the imperial experience coming out of Merry Old England: the United States of America. This is a point only made incidentally by Sathnam Sanghera when he underscores that the US is a British imperial creation, and that ‘One of the biggest lies America tells itself is that it rejects everything the awful [British] empire ever stood for’ (Sanghera 2024, 23). In this chapter I would like to pay more attention to this sprout of British imperialism to explore how the praeter- colonial mind can make sense of what I call the ‘Reluctant Empire’ – an empire in all but name in a supposedly post-colonial era. Since this is a chapter on the community of nations that is, or should be, known collectively as ‘Americans’ – that is, the inhabitants of the continent of America – it belongs in the first part of this study dedicated to all these different ‘Huddles’ we choose, or are made, to identify with. A separate chapter, titled ‘America First, Humanity Second: Trump, MAGA, and American Imperialism Revisited’ (Chapter Nine), will further delve into the many challenges that neo-imperial Trumpism poses to the world, and particular the Americas. I advise the reader to use that chapter as a companion to the present one.

We Are All Americans

When I was a teenager growing up in Chile in the 2000s, for some reason it became fashionable to be anti-American – a fad that occasionally afflicts Europeans and Latin Americans alike. In this iteration I witnessed how some of my classmates who just a few years before enjoyed the latest episodes of Friends, The Simpsons, or WWE, and listened to music released by Green Day, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Blink 182, overnight started hating the US and rejecting everything it stood for.

Some of them even formed a band called Yanquis Muertos (‘Dead Yankees’), such was the extent of their new-found resentment. I can still hear the lyrics of their first ever single, played to the tune of a reasonably good punk rock track: ‘¡No queremos más yanquis, yanquis!’ (‘We don’t want any more Yankees, Yankees!’). The lead guitarist would make comments such as ‘They don’t even have a proper name – the US is a country without a name’, meaning that all the words ‘United States of America’ convey is a form of political organization plus a geographic location, or ‘an adjective attached to a generic noun’ (Grandin 2025, xxi). How the similar designation ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ slipped under his radar is beyond me.

However, there is a point to the traditional objection against the use of the term ‘America’ to refer to a single country in a continent housing three dozen different nations (Rousseau and Houdart 2007). Every person located south of the Río Bravo will scold you if you use ‘America’ to signify the US, or ‘American’ to refer to its citizens. ‘We are all American – America is a continent’ the bitter retort will usually go.

And it is technically correct. America is indeed a continent, named almost by accident by a German cartographer in 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, who drew up the first world map designating the continent ‘discovered’ by Columbus as ‘America’, in recognition of the exploits of one Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who circumnavigated the globe and thus confirmed that the territory Columbus thought was India was indeed a separate continent (Parker 2022, 93).

If you think about it, the new landmass might just as well have been named ‘Vespucia’ instead of ‘America’, and the country that is the subject of this chapter would be called the ‘United States of Vespucia’, populated by Vespucians living the Vespucian Dream, all the while Latinos insisting that we are all indeed Vespucians. Or, if history was a little fairer, the continent would be named after Columbus, thus ‘Columbia’ not amounting to just a university in New York or ‘Colombia’ to one single country in South America (Grandin 2025, xv). William Thornton, the designer of the Capitol building in Washington D.C., thought as much when he proposed his idea for a Pan- American Constitution for ‘United North and South Columbia’ in 1800 (Andrew et al. 1932).

Doesn’t Columbus deserve a continent with his name on it to match the magnitude of this contribution to world history, for better or worse? But history is rarely fair or accurate like that, so America it is and America it will remain. Not surprisingly, Waldseemüller’s map containing what has been called the ‘birth certificate’ of America sits in the Library of the US Congress after the North American country paid handsomely to acquire such a precious –........

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