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"U.S. imperialism"
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Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion
\" Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Freeport and the States: Politics of Corporations and Contemporary Colonialism in West Papua
Corporations often claim to be economic actors solely interested in capital accumulation. However, historical and anthropological scholarship has argued they have had outsized political roles, especially during high colonialism when transnational corporations such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company shaped colonial entities. This article explores the case of American mining company Freeport-McMoRan, which runs the world’s largest gold and copper mine in West Papua, and its entanglement with contemporary imperial and colonial projects in the region. Through the study of the company’s decisive role in the transfer of West Papua from the Dutch to Indonesia during the decolonization period of the 1960s, and in the formation of the postcolonial Indonesian state characterized by its militaristic and capitalistic stances, this article argues that Freeport’s operation in West Papua has been central to shaping U.S. imperial policy in Southeast Asia. The company’s relationship with the U.S. government and its contract of work with the Indonesian government reproduce an older form of state-corporation partnership called a charter, which grants a corporate body privileges associated with exploration, trade, and colonization. Combining a historical study of the political role of corporations across time and an ethnographic study of Freeport’s operation, this article rethinks the anthropological and historical study of transnational corporations and their roles in the contemporary politics of colonialism.
Journal Article
Imperial Entanglements: Afghan Refugees and the Reimagining of Midwestern Identity in Muncie, Indiana
This article examines how Afghan refugee resettlement in Muncie, Indiana challenges dominant narratives about both Midwestern homogeneity and refugee victimhood. Through research with Afghan refugees who arrived following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I analyze how everyday encounters between refugees and longtime residents reveal complex imperial connections. Drawing on Critical Refugee Studies, I argue that Afghan presence in the American Midwest is not incidental but directly produced by decades of U.S. military intervention. Cultural narratives that portray the Midwest as predominantly white are not only misleading but also fuel dangerous ideologies like nativism and white supremacy, which lead to anti-refugee and immigrant policies and practices that have dire consequences. By centering Afghan refugees within longer histories of imperialism, racialization, and migration, I demonstrate how face-to-face interactions produce unexpected alliances that question previously held ideologies and challenge U.S. empire. This work contributes to understanding how refugee integration collapses boundaries between foreign and domestic, revealing how empire fundamentally shapes citizenship, belonging, and regional identity in America’s heartland.
Journal Article
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Global Sociology and the Anti-racist Struggle for Democracy in Cuba (1931–1941)
During the 1930s and 1940s, W. E. B. Du Bois was not only interested in European colonialism in Africa, but he also approached the racial situation in the Americas, particularly Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba. In this article, I examine how Du Bois engaged strategically in a critique of racism in Cuba and the United States. I analyze how Du Bois discussed the Cuban color line as linked to colonial dispossession and explore the formation of the anti-colonial critique within global sociology. Du Bois’s letters, manuscripts, and field notes during his first visit to Cuba in 1941 reveal how, to a large extent, Du Bois shared the prevailing vision of Cuba as a society free from racism. Although Du Bois only partially captured how racism worked in Cuba, he constantly affirmed how the analysis of the Cuban color line implies dealing with the analysis of American imperialism. Thus, Du Bois’s approach to Cuba was fundamental in two senses. First, it led him to consider the contradictions between cultural integration and social and economic equality in a setting other than the United States. Second, Du Bois developed the fundamental place assigned to the critique of U.S. imperialism within global sociology. At the same time, Du Bois’s connection with Cuba elaborates the understanding of Du Bois’s global sociology.
Journal Article
The Invention of “Noncitizen American Nationality” and the Meanings of Colonial Subjecthood in the United States
This article contributes to histories of formal American imperialism by telling the stories of Filipinas/os and Puerto Ricans who, after 1899, became “noncitizen American nationals.” Drawing on congressional, legal, and administrative sources, the article argues that noncitizen nationality was colonial subjecthood, a status invented to prevent island peoples from becoming U.S. citizens. Filipinas/os and Puerto Ricans were not the first U.S. colonial subjects, and this article shows how the similar status of “ward” had recently come to define the relationship between the U.S. and Native Americans. The article closes with an examination of some of the rights, liberties, opportunities, and obligations that gave substance and meaning to American colonial subjecthood in the early twentieth century.
Journal Article
The Dirty Work of Empire: Imperialist Deep Time in Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”
This essay studies Poe’s story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), which depicts “Bedloe,” a man from a past imperial struggle in India participating in a present imperial struggle in the United States through a time-lapse narrative. I argue that Poe, here, prefigures the “white man’s burden” critique of empire—the view that empire most harms the white men who are its instruments. In making this claim, Poe both reifies the racial category of whiteness and advances a critique of US expansionist politics. Thus, I read Poe’s story as a critique of empire and a defense of imperial instruments.
Journal Article
Picturing Forgotten Filipinx: Family Photographs and Resisting U.S. Colonial Amnesias
U.S. imperialism in the Philippines has led to the multiple generations of diasporic conditions of colonial amnesia and systematic forgetting of history. Its impact on the Filipinx community has left unrecorded memories and voices of immigrants silenced, and considered lost to history. This study examines the relationship between U.S. colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines and the experiences of Filipinx immigration to the U.S. through a critical Indigenous feminist lens of visual imagery and storytelling. Given that many of the experiences within the Filipinx diaspora in relation to the American Empire have been systematically forgotten and erased, this study utilizes family photographs in framing the challenges and reinscribes harmful hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives. With a combination of semi-structured interviews and photo analysis as a form of visual storytelling, the family photographs within the Filipinx diaspora may reframe, challenge, and resist hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives by holding memories of migration, loss, family belonging, and community across spatial and generational boundaries that attempt to erase by the U.S. nation-state. Results shed light on resistance and survivance through bayanihan (community care) spirit.
Journal Article
Globalization, Yankee Imperialism, and Machismo in the Mexican Narco-Narrativa
Rather than existing in a parallel, disconnected manner from the licit transnational circuits of the global capitalist economy, the transnational drug trade is in fact a core component of this system and one that has to a considerable extent dictated the terms of Mexico’s placement within it, as well as the shape of contemporary Mexican society. This has given rise to a sizeable body of narco-narrativas (‘narco-narratives’) which serve as means of textually exploring Mexico’s immediate ‘street-level’ experiences of the transnational flows of capital and goods comprising globalization and the social consequences of the shift towards neoliberal political economy. This essay argues that in doing so these narratives variously confront the shifting social dynamics of neoliberal-globalizing Mexico, a U.S. imperialism that takes new forms for a new era, and the culture of machismo that animates Mexican drug cartels. Martin Solares’s Don’t Send Flowers poses this period of rising cartel violence as a second major crisis transforming Mexican society, after the economic collapse and subsequent IMF-mandated structural reforms of 1982, one that runs the risk of simply producing more uneven and socially marginalizing capitalist development. Elmer Mendoza’s The Acid Test, on the other hand, sees a sad inevitability in continuing drug violence and an exiled but not effaced possibility of moral action and leftist populist social reform, while Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons uses the figure of the drug trafficking kingpin to allegorizes the relationship of art to worldly power and to stress the need of art to distance itself from capitalist criminality and propagandistic social functioning.
Journal Article
Filial Phantasmagoria
Antonio Maceo Grajales (1845–1896) is one of the most celebrated heroes of Cuban independence. Though he died before he could see the dawn of a sovereign, if U.S.-occupied, Cuba, Maceo would become an important node of nationalist commemoration. Throughout this process, Maceo’s blackness represented both a source of his prestige—the struggle against African slavery had been intimately tied to independence—and a barometer of lingering racial inequalities. Posthumous depictions thus tended to downplay racial tensions in a unifying vision of nation. Yet Maceo’s martyrdom in the Spanish-Cuban-American War also reverberated in more uncanny registers. Before and after his death, apocryphal sons emerged periodically from the shadows, opening battles over Maceo’s legacy. In their movement across borders, these real and apocryphal children gave voice to silences around race and sovereignty as they converged on the body of their lionized “father,” while also opening up narrative spaces wherein the status quo could be reimagined.
Journal Article
Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines
From the first years of the American occupation of the Philippines, the American colonial elite ran their households with the help of Chinese servants. The preference of government officials, including Governor William Howard Taft himself, for Chinese domestic labor was in flagrant disregard for the policy of Chinese exclusion as well as the principle of “benevolent assimilation,” according to which the Americans claimed to be “uplifting” the Filipino people by providing them with the opportunity to experience the dignity of labor. In opting for Chinese rather than Filipino domestic labor, elite Americans were replicating the traditions of the “Old World” colonizers, particularly the British in Asia.
Journal Article