Come retribution: Revanchism, settler colonialism, and the geographical imagination of Donald Trump's America

Editor’s Note Mari Yoshihara This issue of American Quarterly goes into production in the wake of the 2016 election, and by the time this issue goes to print, Donald Trump will be serving as president of the United States. Even as American studies scholars have long dedicated ourselves to understanding white supremacy, patriarchy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism, the election results have been a tremendous shock. The values, policies, and behavior represented by Trump, his supporters, and those he is choosing as his staff are deeply in opposition to the fundamental principles of the ASA community. The election results challenge us to seriously reflect on what it means to do American studies and renew our commitments as scholars, teachers, and activists in this world. What the United States and the world are about to face under the Trump administration—many aspects of which will try to undermine the gains of decades of social activism, others of which will reinforce the injustices and inequalities structured into American society long before this election—all the more underscores the critical importance of rigorous intersectional analysis of American history and society and engaged pedagogy and activism. It is, then, perhaps fitting that we open this issue with an essay on the question of entrance to the White House. Kate Masur examines African Americans’ demands for recognition at White House social functions and whites’ varied reactions during the Lincoln administration. Other essays in this issue also address race, biopower, and regulation of body and space in different political contexts. Juliet Nebolon focuses on public health programs in World War II Hawai‘i to analyze the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization, illustrating how wartime racial liberalism compelled all people in Hawai‘i to cultivate health, which then led to the extraction of biomedical resources in the name of military security. John Bloom looks at mandatory bicycle regulation and bicycle stakeouts in Washington, DC, in 1963–2009 as a mechanism for policing of racial boundaries in public spaces, which fore-shadowed the racialized law and order policies practiced across the nation. Joseph Darda and Theresa Geller both analyze the cultural narratives about the state and war in film and television. Darda chronicles how the George H. W. Bush administration revised the cultural narrative of the Vietnam War by militarizing the humanitarian ethic of the antiwar movement in the Persian Gulf and how the militarization of humanitarian affect contained liberal anti-war [End Page v] discourse. Geller’s study of The X-Files uses Fredric Jameson’s methods to illustrate the show’s allegorization of the dialectical relationship between the governmental conspiracy and the effects of its unchecked power on marginalized communities. This issue carries four book reviews on new scholarship in diverse topics. In her review of three books that reassess the analytic of intersectionality, Jennifer C. Nash problematizes the impulse toward a “correct” reading and historicization of intersectionality and calls for a sustained interrogation of the ways in which “black woman” haunts the unconscious of the fields. This review provides a useful context for Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s discussion of three works on black sexuality, erotic labor, and pornography. Patrick Wilz reviews four books on discourses of opposition in the twentieth century. John Worsencroft’s review examines four works on militarized state, community, and citizenship. In an event review, Kristin Moriah discusses the paradox of the seeming ascendance of ethnic diversity on the popular stage in her review of the 2016 Broadway musical Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2017 The American Studies Association

The rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest (PNW) craft beer industry and the heralding of Seattle as an epicenter of “hoppy beer” has benefited from geographic proximity to the Yakima Valley, revered by many as the “hops capital of world.” In this article, I center theory from Black studies, Native studies, and critical whiteness studies to examine the intersectional violences of settler colonialism and whiteness as structuring logics of the PNW hops and craft beer industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2019, I argue that the settler colonial history of PNW hops cultivation and present-day culture of exclusion that extends outward into relationships with craft brewers, sustain a hegemonic whiteness. Moreover, I suggest that craft beer culture in the United States, as a site of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, has benefitted from ongoing dispossession through gentrification and cultural appropriation. By way of conclusion, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing attempts to dismantle whiteness within the US craft beer industry.

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

Towards a bidirectional decoloniality in academic global health: insights from settler colonialism and racial capitalism

In this paper, I analyse the intersection of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and border violence by examining Cabecitas Blancas a project run by the Yucatecan government to reunite families divided by the US-Mexican border. A unique program in Mexico, Cabecitas Blancas helps elders who have not seen their children living in the United States for at least 10 years, due to their children’s precarious immigration status, reunite for a short period of time. I have developed the term tramitología to show the way the settler colonial state monitors and restrict Indigenous mobility by designating who is “worthy” of government support. I demonstrate how the flow of mostly Maya elders via Cabecitas Blancas between borders is facilitated only because they become state commodities that sustain racial capitalism via tourism and multicultural policies. Ultimately, I argue that reform programs such as Cabecitas Blancas enable and (re)produce exploitation, settler colonialism and border violence. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with government officials as well as YouTube videos and online news articles depicting different stages of the program.

<i>Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear</i> by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras Christopher A. Loperena (bio) The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories.1 The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.2 Settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people. Although qualitatively different from the colonial project imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese—at least from an ideological perspective, since it was contingent on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the national body politic—settler colonialism remains pertinent to analyses of race relations in Latin America. Wolfe states that settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on a “logic of elimination.”3 Through an analysis of settler violence, I elucidate the relationship between settler colonial logics and contemporary development practices in Honduras. The ongoing removal and elimination of indigenous and black peoples is epitomized by the targeted repression and killing of key indigenous social movement activists, including the March 2016 assassination of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres. [End Page 801] The logic of elimination is also expressed through legal arrangements that erode collective property rights and undermine black and indigenous sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories. Although Honduras has signed and ratified international legal conventions on the territorial rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, the state has aggressively pursued development projects that directly violate these rights. Even communities in possession of titles to their lands are subject to these forms of expropriation, particularly when the motive is couched within the discourse of national progress. Progress as Settler Colonial Logic In Latin America, national progress is crucially bound up with white socio-spatial epistemologies, which relegate indigenous peoples to a mythical past and thus render invisible contemporary indigenous peoples’ existence and political vitality.4 Indeed, the ideology of indo-Hispanic racial mixture, or mestizaje, has been used to negate indigenous and black territorial claims and to buttress the political and economic aspirations of the mestizo elite. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation through the ideology of mestizaje ultimately furthers the whitening project on which postcolonial national identity was founded.5 Aspirations to whiten the nation gain material coherence through development practice. Following Keisha-Khan Perry, I understand development projects as the spatial dimension of the whitening ideology.6 The proliferation of extractivist economic activities within black and indigenous territories asserts national sovereignty over the natural resources to which rural communities of color lay claim, and thereby buttresses white spatial imaginaries. Sharlene Mollet’s research in the Honduran Mosquitia illustrates how indigenous land use practices are defined as backward and thus deemed, by the state, unsuitable for market production.7 In this way, racist understandings of indigenous inferiority position mestizo colonos (settlers) as more apt to use the land productively and thus legitimates their continued presence and spatial dominance over black and indigenous peoples. Indeed, the notion of “idle” or “underutilized” land has served as a central justification for the usurpation of lands in areas populated by indigenous and black peoples and which have been folded into the agrarian reform policies adopted by the state, beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1962. Because indigenous and black peoples’ lands were often classified as underutilized, they were subject...

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‘They took our beads, it was a fair trade, get over it’: Settler colonial logics, racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture

Editors’ Introduction

In this article, we discuss contemporary art practices as avenues for disrupting settler colonial narratives; we explore how the practices developed and adopted by contemporary Native American and First Nations artists can challenge settler colonial feelings. Employing the concept of settler common sense, we attend to the affective experience of encountering these artists’ works and consider how their works can enable the viewers to feel, sense, and think outside of/in opposition to/against settler colonial logics. We first explain the concept of settler colonialism and illustrate how settler colonial narratives operate; we illuminate the affective dimension of settler colonialism and how settler colonial narratives and feelings are bound up in art. To demonstrate possible pathways through this process, we discuss the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore and Tanya Lukin Linklater, considering how their practices can disrupt. We argue for a move away from settler futurity.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

Despite increasing institutionalised recognition of Indigenous and Black environmental concerns in governance processes, the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in North America continue to normalise dispossession and disproportionately burden marginalised communities with environmental harms. Engaging recent critiques of the inability of Indigenous rights frameworks to reverse ongoing colonial dispossessions and the failure of environmental justice policies to address racialised environmental inequalities, this article argues that political ecologists must contend with the limitations of institutionalisedrecognitionof historically marginalised communities in North American environmental governance. We argue that institutionalisation of such concern, while putatively redressing injustices or reconciling dispossession through environmental governance, functions more to elide historic drivers and geographic processes of marginalisation than to disrupt white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Taking as a starting point the desire of many to locate the unfolding genocide in Gaza in the irrationality of its perpetrators — the Israeli state and/or its imperial backers — this article proposes instead to understand it as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule, but the global capitalist system as a whole. Building on the existing literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and insisting on the ways that both should be understood not as discrete, self-contained objects of study, but as co-constitutive elements of the global order, this article attempts to illuminate the structural logics at play in Israel’s latest and most brutal assault on Palestinian life. In doing so, the article emphasises Zionism’s role in maintaining western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy and, in turn, the latter’s commitment to guaranteeing its stability and dominance. The article resists, however, the urge to move from explaining current structures of domination to declaring them as final or unshakable. It therefore ends by proposing possible different tomorrows, through an engagement with the Palestinian revolutionary tradition.

Transpacific Radical Solidarities:Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism Leanne P. Day (bio) Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine. By Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 284 pages. $34.95 (paperback). Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State. By Moon-Ho Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 368 pages. $29.95 (cloth). Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines. By Allan E. S. Lumba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paperback). Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries. By Jodi Kim. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 272 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paperback). On July 13, 2022, US vice president Kamala Harris spoke virtually at the Pacific Islands Forum: "The history and the future of the Pacific Islands and the United States are inextricably linked. We have historic bonds going back generations, and shared fights for freedom and for liberty."1 The Pacific Islands Forum summit included a meeting of representatives from Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu; notably absent were Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, and Nauru, which all abruptly withdrew from the forum in February 2021.2 While Harris's remarks allude to the "inextricably linked" histories of the US and Oceania, her phrasing elides the specific history of uneven relations of settler colonialism, imperialism, and military expansion throughout the Pacific. Despite Harris's emphasis on "shared fights for freedom [End Page 405] and for liberty," freedom indexes US democratic freedom and military access to the Pacific as opposed to supporting decolonization. Even more revelatory in Harris's speech is the implied necessity of increasing militarized security in the Pacific against the unstated but ominous threat of China's expanding influence, particularly in the Solomon Islands. Harris twice asserts the US's investment in building "maritime security" and alludes to China's influence by promising "to strengthen the international rules-based order—to defend it, to promote it, and to build on it."3 Not only is security associated with the discourse of international norms for sovereignty, which seems at best a very glamoured, even delusional, version of American militarism and empire in the Pacific, but Harris also emphasizes the necessity of "defend[ing]" rules regarding territorial integrity. This conflates the history of perceived mutual agreement of US imperialism, along with other colonial actors, in the Pacific, and explicitly contrasts the US's stance on protection and defense against China. Harris imagines a mutual relationship between US empire dependent on what Jodi Kim discusses in Settler Garrison as the "China threat discourse," which "can be deployed as an alibi to retrench the West's own imperial and neocolonial interests … [since] the Chinese threat must be contained, and that vulnerable nations must be protected from that threat" (57). The perceived threat of China to US military dominance in the Pacific is further illustrated by President Joe Biden's meeting at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2022, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Biden's meeting reveals not only US concerns over China's influence in the South China Sea but also a disturbing revisionist history of what Biden classified as "rocky times" during former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte's thousands of extrajudicial killings.4 Biden's commitment to the "defense of the Philippines" actually references the genealogies that Moon-Ho Jung and Allan Lumba explicate in their texts to analyze how US imperialism, economic colonialism, and expansive military campaigns in the Philippines utilize the rhetoric of protection for the sake of the Philippines.5 In the staggering yet unsurprising elision of colonial relations, Biden tweeted "Our nations' relationship is rooted in democracy, common history, and people-to-people ties, including millions of Filipino-Americans who enrich our nation. Our alliance is strong and enduring" in a 2022 manifestation of implicit racial paternalism, where Filipino Americans "enrich our nation," a phrase that gestures toward a false pretense of an equal relationship...