Between Subalternity and Imperialism: Black Military Workers in U.S. History

Abstract

Khary Oronde Polk demonstrates how popular and pseudoscientific ideas about race and gender have governed and shaped the biopolitics and necropolitics of U.S. militarism in his study of “black military workers” serving abroad from 1898 to 1948. Using African American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and military history approaches—as well as a range of printed primary and archival sources—Polk offers a theoretically sophisticated narrative, which challenges and builds off the ways in which historians have moved Blacks from the marginalia of U.S. military history to the center. From the enlistment of African American men as soldiers and the recruitment of Black women as “immune nurses” during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, to the deployment of Black soldiers and Black women nurses and auxiliary corps members during World War II, Polk’s narrative elucidates how “American military history is, among other things, a record of race and gender” (9). Contagions of Empire runs counter to histories that emphasize the heroism of African American men who served in the military overseas, but which fail to deconstruct critically the narrative of heterosexual Black men fighting for their “manhood rights.” Polk presents a more complex analysis of Black military service that problematizes histories of Black men and women participating in overseas war-making, imperialist expansion, and military occupation to “earn” enfranchisement, civil rights, and full citizenship in a white supremacist nation. He captures the racialized and gendered interstices through which Black men and women entered U.S. military history during the early period of modern global war.