Settler Militarism at the Edge/End of Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

At this historical moment of late-stage U.S. imperialism, marked by the ongoing collapse of American exceptionalism and the continuation of necropolitical violence, this panel takes up the urgent call to confront settler colonialism and militarization as simultaneous processes in the perpetuation of empire. By centering sites and struggles located at the edge of U.S. empire––places and peoples marginalized and/or omitted from its imagined territorial/cultural/ sociopolitical/racial borders—we answer the call to reorient American Studies towards examining how settler militarism shapes and sustains systems of exploitation and dispossession, while giving rise to insurgent solidarities and queer futurities. The “edge” as analytic not only invokes the shadows and peripheries of U.S. empire but also lends a critical “edge” to shed light on struggles, solidarities, and counter-hegemonic knowledge production that take place at the edge/end of empire. From Puerto Rico, the Pacific Islands, to Abya Yala and Turtle Island, this panel interrogates the operations, technologies, and infrastructures of settler militarism that sustain late-stage U.S. empire, as well as the transnational forms of solidarity, relation, memory, and imagination which have been (and are being) crafted to resist and remake our worlds.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Militarized Biopolitical Displacement: Hansen’s Disease and Spatialized Governance of Care in Okinawa under U.S. Occupation - Ka-eul Yoo, University of California Irvine

• “Feeling Brown”, Sounding Yellow: Puerto Rican Soldiers in the Korean War and the Sonic Cartography of Settler Militarism - Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University

• Tangled Temporalities and Nested Colonialism: Tracing “Crypto-Filibusterism” in Puerto Rico’s Late-Stage Empire - Jose I Fuste, UC San Diego

Chair

• Juliet Nebolon, Trinity College

Comment

• Juliet Nebolon, Trinity College

Biographical Information

Chair and Comment:
Juliet Nebolon (juliet.nebolon@trincoll.edu), Trinity College

Juliet Nebolon (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Her research and teaching bring a transnational perspective to the study of race, indigeneity, and gender in the United States, with a particular focus on U.S. war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Her book, Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of US Empire (Duke UP, 2024), focuses on the martial law period in Hawai‘i during the Pacific War. This interdisciplinary project explores the overlapping regimes of settler colonialism and militarization in the domains of land acquisition, public health, domestic science, education, and internment. Her article in American Quarterly, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai‘i during World War II,” was awarded the American Studies Association’s 2018 Constance M. Rourke Prize.

Presenters:
Ka-eul Yoo (kaeuly1@uci.edu), University of California, Irvine

Ka-eul Yoo is an interdisciplinary global Asian studies scholar, specializing in disability justice, public health policy, comparative Asian diasporas, U.S. empire and transpacific violence, and Cold War racism and ableism. She is an assistant professor at Global and International Studies, UC Irvine.

Junyoung Verónica Kim (junyoung.v.kim@gmail.com), New York University

Junyoung Verónica Kim is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. She has published on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War. Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special issue of positions: asia critique on "The Transpacific Korean War."


José I. Fusté (jfuste@ucsd.edu), University of California, San Diego

José I. Fusté is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines how race, empire, and coloniality intersect in the Hispanophone Antilles and across Latin Caribbean diasporas. Fusté’s early research focused on the intertwining of modern U.S. colonialism, racism, and residential segregation in Puerto Rico’s public housing projects. He is currently finalizing his book manuscript, Entangled Crossings: Afro-Latinx Migrations Between Race and Empire (1860s–1910s), which traces the emergence of some of the earliest known yet archivally silenced proto-Afro-Latinx political subjectivities through the transnational networks of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Boricua intellectuals. By charting their movement across New York, Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, the project illuminates critical debates surrounding Blackness, Latinidad, and empire at the turn of the twentieth century. His second book project analyzes the “afterlives” of the 1898 U.S. colonial invasions in the Hispanophone Antilles, focusing on how ongoing colonial structures impact human and non-human actors. Rather than invoking conventional, anthropocentric metaphors of “debt,” he investigates multi-layered obligations and ecological entanglements that surpass liberal-capitalist frameworks, suggesting alternative routes for envisioning justice and post-colonial political futures.

Boyeong Kim (bkim67@ucsc.edu), University of California, Santa Cruz

Boyeong Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in transpacific economic imaginaries, memory politics, and citizen-making in Asia and Latin America. She is currently working on a book manuscript that critically compares how memory politics that glorify economic achievement since authoritarian rule have shaped gendered and racialized neoliberal citizenship in South Korea and Chile.