Mapping American innocence in the Pacific: Cold War empire, militarization and suburbanization at Kwajalein Atoll

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article represents a historical and ethnographic reflection on the process of researching an active US military base in the Marshall Islands, while offering analysis of the spatial and cultural forms of suburbanization on the island that emerged during the Cold War. Kwajalein Island served as a support base for the nuclear testing campaign in the Northern Marshall Islands (1946–1958). At that campaign’s conclusion, the island was transformed into a segregated suburban missile installation that remains active today. By tracing my research process on the island, including discoveries of sources that helped me examine the importation of US racial signifiers marking the island’s social order, I offer an analysis on how the physical and cultural construction of this segregated suburban landscape on Kwajalein has helped support an exceptionalist narrative of US imperial innocence in the region.