There is a version of me that exists in an alternate timeline—one who spends her afternoons in an archive, elbow-deep in 19th-century newspapers, tracing the symbolic architecture of empire with scholarly serenity. In that version of the world, I have the time, energy, and generational wealth to devote myself entirely to the study of how the West stretched its borders, languages, religions, and beauty ideals across continents. But in this timeline—the unfortunate real one—I am drinking coffee at 11 p.m., typing a discussion post on Canvas about postcolonial theory while also memorizing vocabulary for a quiz due tomorrow. I want to dismantle empire. I also want eight hours of sleep. I am, unfortunately, a multitasking anti-imperialist with homework.
The irony, of course, is that the forces I want to critique are the ones that set the conditions I live in. I can’t study imperialism all day because I am too busy navigating the systems built from its bones. Even academia—the place supposedly dedicated to critical inquiry—carries the fingerprints of empire everywhere. The “correct” way to write is the academic register, polished and standardized, its origins in European intellectual tradition. My best insights supposedly count for less if they don’t sound like they could be footnoted in an Oxford publication. The more casually I write, the less “serious” I am. The more human I sound, the less legitimate I seem. There is a silent expectation that the well-trained student must translate their original thinking into the linguistic preferences of a specific class—one with a passport, a library card, and centuries of institutional inheritance behind it.
It’s strange to learn that even language has a border. And stranger still to realize that we cross those borders every time we turn in homework.
Colonial hierarchies didn’t dissolve at the moment of independence ceremonies. They adapted. They moved from flags and gunboats to cultural standards that still govern daily life. Take beauty, for instance: the features most celebrated in mainstream media—thin noses, lighter skin, smooth hair—are not universal ideals. They are imperial echoes. For centuries, Europeans held themselves as the aesthetic default, and the world was taught, with steady pressure and measurable violence, to see itself through that lens. Today, the messaging persists in makeup ads, casting choices, photo editing apps, and TikTok filters that can instantly whiten teeth, thin faces, and heighten cheekbones. It exists in the offhand compliments about someone’s “refined profile,” the polite praise of a “clean” or “elegant” look. We inherited a global beauty hierarchy we did not consent to but continue to breathe like air.
I notice it most on days when I am genuinely trying to focus on homework—when I am reading about colonialism in a textbook that never fully admits how violent it was. I am asked to absorb the facts while pushing down the emotional weight of them. The language is sanitized to make the reader comfortable, to make centuries of cultural erasure appear orderly, inevitable, even professional. The emotional truth—the grief, the loss, the survival—is squeezed out in favor of passive voice and tidy academic framing. “Territories were acquired.” “Borders were redrawn.” People disappear in the syntax.
Meanwhile, I sit at my desk writing about this in APA format.
There is something almost comedic about the situation: learning about empire through the very structures empire built; critiquing dominant power systems while conforming to them in order to earn the grade; writing passionately about decolonization while praying the professor won’t take points off for using contractions. It is a quiet tension that every young scholar from the Global Majority recognizes: the awareness that you are “allowed” to speak, as long as you speak in the master’s vocabulary.
Even the time I have to think is rationed. Between readings, assignments, work, and the minor details of staying alive, I don’t have the luxury of sitting with the enormity of history for hours at a time. The emotional digestion of colonialism—of its reach, its endurance, its reappearance in everyday spaces like magazine covers, loan applications, and school rubrics—must happen in the in-between spaces: on the bus, in the shower, while heating leftovers.
But maybe that’s the real proof that empire is still functioning. We don’t have to be studying colonialism to feel its shape. We just have to be living with it.
One day—maybe in the future—I will have the time to devote to this fully. I will research without the ticking clock of deadlines. I will write in the voice that feels true, not the one that will earn the A. I will read the additional sources I bookmarked at 3 a.m. with the solemn promise of “later.” I will peel back the intellectual surface of empire, not just skim its headlines.
For now, I am a student with laundry to fold, a reading response due at midnight, and a head full of historical contradictions. I don’t have a full critique of imperialism yet.
But I’m working on it.
Between classes.
Kithéa 