Migration and the New Imperial Conjuncture: Book Roundtable for Emily Mitchell-Eaton’s New Destinations of Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The end of the Cold War saw the dissolution of one of the U.S.’s largest colonial landholdings, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI). In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the newly-formed Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau, once part of the TTPI, articulated their independence from the U.S. For many, this moment heralded an era—or at least a promise—of post-coloniality. But formal sovereignty did not end these countries’ ties to the U.S. Instead, the Compacts of Free Association, a set of expansive bilateral agreements passed in 1986 between the U.S. and its new Freely Associated States (FAS), enshrined links between these nations, including expansive economic ties, exclusive U.S. military access to the region, and the right of visa-free migration to the U.S. for FAS citizens. In the four decades since the first Compact was enacted, thousands of Marshall Islanders and Micronesians have emigrated to the U.S., creating new diasporic communities across the continental and archipelagic U.S.

The continuing entanglements between U.S. global imperial and military power and the right of formerly colonized peoples to migrate—in short, the links between empire and migration—pose challenges to the possibility of meaningful self-determination in the 21st century, an era once heralded by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “America’s Pacific Century.” In January 2025, the Trump administration began using Guantánamo to deport and detain migrants, threatened to retake the Panama Canal, and proposed a Compact of Free Association with Greenland. These political moves toward what some view as “old-school” colonialism make the U.S.’s already-implausible transition to a postcolonial future seem even less likely. How can scholars and activists make sense of contemporary U.S. empire? Which alternative political futures can we imagine? And how can we map the current conjuncture while keeping our sights set on liberation?

This roundtable convenes panelists to engage these questions in dialogue with Emily Mitchell-Eaton’s book, New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press). Mitchell-Eaton’s account of Marshallese migration to Arkansas situates this diasporic movement between two sites within the larger scale of U.S. empire. Honing in on Springdale, AR, the book shows how Marshallese and Latinx immigration has remade this “all-white by design” town over the past four decades, transforming relations of labor, (non)citizenship, and activism there. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and D.C., New Destinations of Empire examines how U.S. empire both enables and constrains mobility for its subjects.

Using New Destinations of Empire as a jumping-off point, and drawing from contemporary lessons on the ground in Puerto Rico, this roundtable will center on themes cutting across the panelists’ work, including immigrants’ rights, decolonial rhetorics, and U.S. geopolitics. Panelists will draw upon their (inter)disciplinary groundings in Geography, History, American Studies, Feminist Studies, and Migration Studies to consider what it means to assert “the right to move,” “the right to remain,” and the right to self-determination under late-stage U.S. empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• A Naomi Paik, University of Illinois, Chicago

Panelists

• Rick Baldoz, Brown University

• Jenna Loyd, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Emily Mitchell-Eaton, Colgate University

• Karrieann Soto Vega, The Pennsylvania State University

Biographical Information

Rick Baldoz is a scholar of immigration, US empire, and the national security state with a particular focus on the convergence of foreign and domestic policy imperatives in demarcating, delimiting, and administering the borders of the national community. More broadly, his work grapples with the politics of citizenship and national belonging and the fashioning of boundary processes (national, racial, ideological) that determine membership in American society. HIs current book project is Sovereignty's Devil: Immigration, Geopolitics, and the Borders of US Empire, which explores the entanglement of US immigration policy and national security imperatives from the Cold War to the present.

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, “Sanctuary for All,” calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has coedited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Sanctuary Campus Network, Sanctuary for All UIC, the Migration Scholars Collaborative, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include critical ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; abolition; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Karrieann Soto Vega is a DiaspoRican feminista and cultural rhetorician. Her research and teaching spans Puerto Rican and Latinx studies, anticolonial feminism, activism and social movements, performance, and sonic rhetoric. She has received a fellowship from CENTRO: Center for Puerto Rican Studies research project, Rooted + Relational, focusing on the theme of "Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico." Her collaborative efforts also garnered a "Right to the Discipline" grant from the Antipode Foundation. Soto Vega's book manuscript, tentatively titled Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation is under advanced contract with the Intersectional Rhetorics book series of The Ohio State University Press. Based on her dissertation research, which won the Association for the History of Rhetoric's Dissertation Award in 2018, Rhetorics of Defiance is a feminist rhetorical history of Lolita Lebrón—a twentieth century Puerto Rican nationalist, her anti-imperial prison writing, and her relentless coalitional activism, as it reverberates into contemporary struggles. Some of her other work can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; the Journal for the History of Rhetoric; and CENTRO: Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies.

Jenna M. Loyd is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has three main strands: 1) the production and politics of health inequities in the United States; 2) U.S. detention, asylum, and refugee policies and (geo-) politics; and 3) connections between abolition and migrant justice. Her most recent work brings interests in health and migration together in a new project that examines how immigration law is as a structural determinant of health for migrants in the context of climate change. She is the author of Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978 (2014, University of Minnesota Press), co-editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (2012, University of Georgia Press), and co-author, with Alison Mountz, is Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention the United States (2018, University of California Press).

Emily Mitchell-Eaton is a geographer and Assistant Professor at Colgate University. Her book, New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia, 2024) examines the US empire’s long-standing effects on the Marshall Islands and its role in producing a Marshallese imperial diaspora that stretches to northwest Arkansas. Through feminist and decolonial approaches, Mitchell-Eaton examines migration, non-citizenship, and the racialized impacts of imperial histories on global geopolitics. Her work has been published in Political Geography; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space; International Migration Review; Gender, Place and Culture; Geopolitics; Radical History Review; and the edited volume Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (2021).