American Colonies Research Articles

Botanical imaginary of indigeneity and rhizomatic sustainability in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Abstract This article explores a botanical imaginary in A Mercy (2008), the ninth narrative by African American writer and critic Toni Morrison. Arguably, A Mercy features the botanical design of the rhizome to activate a revisionary model of sustainability. In particular, the narrative’s imaginary suggests a synergy that liberates the restrictive root of Indigeneity as a precondition to reconcile a tension of rigid binaries with the customary routes that lead to closure. This reconciliation will enunciate a radical break with the limited sustainability paradigms that are still constitutive of colonial modernity. Arguably, A Mercy features a transgressive array of journeys whose rhizomatic root of biodiversity transcends what is cultivated in the colonial American soil and mobilizes symbiotic and liberatory sustainability for humans and non-humans. Deleuze and Guattari’s principles of the “rhizome” philosophy contribute a main theoretical framework for construing the narrative’s botanical composition that suspends the inequitable realization of sustainability.

Ireland Bros.’ Pan-American Electric Carnival: Canadians’ border-crossing circuits of early cinema

ABSTRACT Early cinema exhibitors George H. and Egerton L. Ireland were better known in Jamaica and Trinidad than in their homeland of Canada. Named the Pan-American Electric Carnival, after a failed bid to show moving pictures at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, between 1900 and 1908 they toured Canada, the United States, across the Caribbean and into South America. Almost absent from Canadian film history, los hermanos Ireland are mentioned in at least eight national and local film histories from across Latin America, and even in a US history. Yet, few of these recognize connections to each other, let alone the brothers’ roots in Canada. I take the Ireland brothers’ peripatetic travels throughout the Western hemisphere as a curious case that is uniquely Canadian. Although Ireland Bros.’ motivations are unknowable, their inter-colonial journeys can only partly be explained by wanderlust, seeking escape from rural Canadian roots. I propose their significance is the provision of modern entertainment that was not simply a conduit of British colonialism nor merely a channel for American imperialism. Instead, I conclude speculatively that the brothers’ circuits of cinema along Pan-American trade routes reflect an ethos of Pan-Americanism emergent at the turn of the twentieth century.

The quest for a good old age: mobility, immobility and Puerto Rican aging in the United States

ABSTRACT Mobility regimes refer to the political economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced, and permitted to move and to migrate. The literature on aging in contexts of mobility regimes has primarily focused on international migration, even though the framework is multi-scalar. This article examines how older Puerto Rican adults navigate mobility regimes in the quest for a subjective good old age. Puerto Rico is a US territory, which means that Puerto Rico-US migration does not span international borders. Drawing on remote ethnographic research with older Puerto Rican adults, I argue that political-economic processes rooted in US colonialism simultaneously condition migration as a strategy for the pursuit of a good old age and contribute to inequitable circumstances that make a good old age hard to find. These inequitable processes manifest in three ways: (1) Unequal healthcare benefits contribute to mobility; (2) Unequal social welfare benefits contribute to immobility; and (3) The meanings and mobilities associated with unequal benefits shift over the life course. By focusing on how governments differentially regulate the internal migration of their own citizens, this article advances understanding of how mobilities and immobilities operate at multiple scales, with important implications for a good old age.

Race, sovereignty, and White settler colonial studies: placing settlers at the Cultural Interface

ABSTRACT White settler colonial studies has been widely criticised for representing settler colonialism as an impenetrable and inevitable structure. This article therefore turns to explore how race preconditions and limits the construction of settler subjects. We draw on Torres Strait Islander theorist Martin Nakata’s Cultural Interface theory to unsettle ‘common-sense’ theories of race, and reconceive of the place where European and Indigenous cultures meet as sovereign Indigenous land. We extend Cultural Interface theory to locate White settler standpoints within the intertwined histories of racial capitalism and European and US imperialism. We argue that these histories orient settlers towards White possessive sovereignty. This article then deploys this framework to provide a deeper understanding of the disciplinary limits of White settler colonial studies through two case studies. First, we analyse Liberia’s construction as a settler colonial nation to denaturalise and historicise White settler standpoints. Second, we analyse the White settler standpoint institutionalised in White settler colonial studies’ descriptions of the settler/Indigenous binary, the logic of elimination, and settler sovereignty. In both cases, White settler standpoints are shaped and limited by the racialised logics of White possessive sovereignty. We nevertheless conclude that settlers may reorient themselves towards Indigenous sovereignty.

Clandestine Issues

Abstract To this day, materials surrounding the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution that live in the archives of Addis Ababa University are designated as “clandestine literature.” Their publication was a clandestine affair; critiquing the emperor of the then-oldest Christian kingdom in the world and eventually professing Marxist thinking, they amounted to blasphemy. However, building an argument for Ethiopian revolution was premised on another heretical proposition: that Ethiopia, world-famous for having eluded European colonial rule, was a client state of US imperialism during the mid-century age of decolonization. This article employs a selection of Ethiopian revolutionary papers—including magazines, newspapers, and journals produced and distributed across Ethiopia, North America, and Europe—to provide a genealogy of “US Imperialism in Ethiopia,” a composite, hand-transcribed document of the late 1960s that has since been destroyed. Assembling materials marked by both their refutation of and proximity to US empire, this article argues that building the case for US imperialism in Ethiopia was a necessary step to clarify and link Ethiopian revolutionary struggle to anticolonialism. In the process, the article thinks with and extends the archival designation “clandestine” as both the conspiracy of alleging US imperialism in Ethiopia and an analytic for reading other transnational networks of revolutionary papers.

US American empire and the telos of US immigration law from 1924 to 2024

ABSTRACT Reflecting on the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Immigration Act, this brief essay suggests that the idea of “US American Empire” forms the telos of the last one hundred years of US immigration policy. Whether in the twentieth or the twenty-first centuries, or under Republican or Democratic leadership, US lawmakers have sought to restrict immigration to those who were deemed most “assimilable.” Such moves are not only about preserving or instituting a particular racial character of the United States but ensuring a particular role for the United States globally.

Racial Capitalism: From British Colonialism to the Settler Colonial Apartheid State

This article explores the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project. It examines first, Israel's internal and external capitalist dynamism, including its treatment of its non-European citizens, namely indigenous Palestinians, and non-Ashkenazi (Arab) Jewish settlers. Second, it explores the state's interdependent relationship with Western, especially US imperialism. The article argues that the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialize, leading to weakening the socio-economic fabric of the Palestinians in their own lands and homeland, creating a favourable condition for the Zionist project to gradually penetrate the land of Palestine and dispossess its population. As a European (Jewish) settler colonial movement, Zionism, founded on racism and racialization, aimed at establishing a new Jewish enclave separate and independent from the indigenous Palestinians. This separateness made it resemble apartheid South Africa, yet the historical specificity of Palestine, where the Zionist settlers did not just alienate, exclude and when needed, use and exploit the Palestinians, but also expelled the indigenous Palestinians and claim Palestine as a ‘pure’ Jewish state.

Miscegenation and militarization: undoing racial colonial citizenship for the next century

ABSTRACT This essay considers the Immigration Act of 1924, otherwise known as the Johnson-Reed Act (JRA), within historical and contemporary contexts of anti-miscegenation and Indigenous erasure that are undercurrents of citizenship and immigration processes. By using a framework of settler colonialism carried out by the U.S. nation-state, we explore connections among racialized peoples in U.S. American empire and the push for racial purity through systems of blood quantum and anti-miscegenation laws. With attention to how colonialism from the continental USA flows to locales such as Guåhan/Guam, a place enacting sovereignty despite occupation and colonial possession, we consider how immigration and citizenship are wielded as tools of U.S. American militarization. Ultimately, we argue that critiquing miscegenation and militarism is necessary to overcome racial and colonial violences of empire.

Colonial Racial Capitalism and Violence: Theorising the Relationship between Empire and Israeli Settler Colonialism

This article theorises the relationship between empire and Israeli settler colonialism through the interplay between violence and capital accumulation in colonial racial capitalism. It argues that Israel's genocidal violences of land theft is the means and grounds for Israeli and US imperial capital accumulation. This can be observed in the genocidal operation in the Gaza Strip. The first section contextualizes the genocide in the Gaza Strip within a larger structure of genocide. The section highlights the centrality of the conquest of land in the Zionist settler colonial project and how that appealed to the British empire in the early parts of the twentieth century. The second section examines why the US empire has actively participated in the genocide. States in the US imperial bloc essentially reduce the whole question of Palestine to a simple equation where Palestinian liberation does not equate with their own economic interests, while Israeli settler colonialism does. Though there exists a tension between imperial and settler colonial interests around the question of what kind of violence is preferable for capital accumulation, the article concludes by arguing that a transformation of the logics and systems of colonial racial capitalism cannot arise without activism and pressure from below on states and capitalist structures.

SOLUTIONS TO IMPLEMENT TRAINING AND RETRAINING POLICY FOR YOUTH IN TAN PHU DISTRICT, HO CHI MINH CITY

Tan Phu district is a suburban district of Ho Chi Minh City, but it also left behind many historical, cultural, architectural and artistic relics as well as revolutionary “red addresses” marking the heroic feats of the army and people of Tan Phu in the two resistance wars against French colonialism and American imperialism. During the development process, Tan Phu district, Ho Chi Minh city always pays attention to implementing the policy of training and retraining the youth in the area, considering youth training and retraining to play a very important role in equipping knowledge and skills for the youth, contributing to the socio-economic development of the district in the current period

To Sever the Limbs of US Imperialism: North Korean Support for Latin American Guerrilla Movements in the 1960s

Abstract During the 1960s North Korea was connected to at least nine armed leftist rebel groups in seven countries in Latin America. Pyongyang primarily supported the revolutionary aims of these groups by providing them with military training inside the dprk. This agenda stemmed from the dprk leadership’s analysis of the international situation, one heavily influenced by its experience in the Korean War and Lenin’s theory of imperialism. This analysis identified the defeat of US imperialism as the primary task of the international Left, and that this could be achieved by the proliferation of armed insurgencies throughout the global South. By contrast, the Latin American militants who travelled to the dprk to undergo intensive military training were in search of personal transformation. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and its doctrine of foquismo, these young radicals sought a transformative experience that would facilitate their evolution from “ordinary” civilians into revolutionary guerrillas.

Sanctions and Stigma: Regional and Global Ordering in the Gulf Crisis

The Gulf Crisis (2017-21) witnessed Qatar facing sanctions by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain, self-proclaimed as the ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Accusing Qatar of sponsoring Islamist terrorism, the Quartet broke diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed an embargo. In reaction, Qatar affirmed its sovereignty yet sought in parallel to expand and make permanent the US al-Udeid airbase—a marker of US imperialism in the region. To understand such a paradox, this article argues that we must study sanctions in tandem with the stigmatization narratives that legitimate them. Sanctions and stigma work together as performances of norms, which themselves serve to bound an order. This article conceptualizes the Gulf Crisis as an episode of regional order-making reproducing the hegemonic repertoire of the US-led global order. The Quartet employed US-inspired practices of sanctioning ‘rogue’ actors and hegemonic narratives on the fight against terrorism, while Qatar sought to counter this stigma by scaling up the al-Udeid airbase to showcase its pro-US, anti-terror credentials. By attending to the deployment of hegemonic norms—through sanctions and stigma—as tools of regional ordering, this article underlines that the Gulf Crisis ultimately contributed to bolstering the normative architecture sustaining the US-led global order.

American imperial exceptionalism? Texas secondary World History depictions of American empire, 1925–2016

ABSTRACT This article explores the connection between American exceptionalism and empire denialism by examining high-school World History textbooks approved for use in the state of Texas from the 1920s to 2016. Scholarship suggests that the powerful ideology of American exceptionalism is deeply uneasy about the role of the United States as an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But despite this widespread assumption, World History textbooks for the past century have routinely labelled the United States an empire, and directly compared US actions with those of European colonising powers. Some textbooks portrayed this as a unique and aberrant time in US history. But other textbook accounts over the past century have made the case that US imperialism brought about material and political benefits to colonised peoples. In other words, a common thread in World History textbooks suggests that America created an exceptional empire. American imperialism was linked to an underlying narrative of the spread of European or Western civilisation, viewed as a cornerstone of modern world history.

One Does (Not) Choose Their Enemies. Why Is America against All?

Book review: America against All [Amerika protiv vsekh] (2023). Geopolitics, Statehood and Global Role of the USA: History and Modernity [Geopolitika, gosudarstvennost’ i global’naya rol’ SSHA: istoriya i sovremennost’]. Moscow: LLC “Commonwealth of Cultures” [OOO “Sodruzhestvo kul’tur”], 588 p.What is America for Russia, the rest of the world and itself? This question is answered differently by historians, journalists, writers, diplomats, academic researchers, and incumbent politicians. Why has the United States – in recent years especially – pursued an exemplarily offensive foreign policy, as if directed “against everyone”? The authors of the book of the same name, “America Against All. Geopolitics, Statehood and the Global Role of the United States: History and Modernity” offer their answer to this question. The authors of the monograph analyze a significant body of literature on the U.S. geopolitical thought, reflect on the origins of American statehood, and seek to trace the formation of the so-called ‘‘American empire” and the spread of American hegemony from the late 19th century to the present day. In conclusion, the authors outline proposals for democratizing modern America. This book review is an attempt to critically analyze the assessments and recommendations of a large number of authors from the Diplomatic Academy, IMEMO RAS, MGIMO University, RUDN, and branch institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Philippine Traces of US Imperial Violence

Reconsideration of a colonial atrocity requires understanding how its legacies are locally understood in the context of present-day concerns.

The Cultural Tradition of Zombification in Haiti: An Example of Film White Zombie

The well-known narrative of zombies, the reanimated monsters of contemporary popular culture, can be traced back to the late 1960s, or more specifically to the release of the film Night of the Living Dead (1968) by American director George A. Romero. However, at the time of the film's inception the term zombie was already widely present in American popular culture: the cinematography of voodoo zombie, created in Haiti through magic and psychoactive substances, appeared in America in 1932, with the release of the film White Zombie, based on the travelogue The Magic Island (1929), by American missionary William Seabrooke. The paper initially points to the social and historical circumstances that led to the spread of zombies in Haiti: as the first independent nation of the Western Hemisphere, Haiti at the beginning of the twentieth century became the subject of American imperialist strategies and a threat to the maintenance of hegemony, therefore in the texts of colonial travel writers it was described as a nation of savagery, black magic, powerful voodoo cults, and the reanimated dead. Cultural and racist stereotypes that were transmitted to the United States justified the American "civilizing" mission, i.e. political and economic interventions. The role of zombies in Haiti was that of a slave, a profitable workforce, used by local urban elites, voodoo sorcerers, and colonial regimes since the eighteenth century. In this regard, my analysis highlights the ways in which White Zombie reproduces the established image of Haiti as an exotic place filled with mystery and dangers, adopts the dominant American viewpoints marked by discrimination and racism, and sets cultural norms of distinguishing between the civilized and the barbaric, whereby the white color of the skin reflects the norm of the civilized. To this end, the dialectic of slavery is emphasized in the film by the zombification of a young white woman, thus manifesting the tensions that existed between the imperialist powers and their "subjects" of enslavement, and emphasizing the unequal power relations between subordinate Haitian slaves and Westerners in high positions. Finally, the changes that have taken place over the decades of the zombie monster's development are highlighted: the zombie moves away from Haiti and approaches the modern world, and becomes a reanimated, highly infectious, cannibalistic monster of consumer society, that is, a monster of the global capitalist system.

American Imperialism

American Imperialism

Hugh Foley, Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire

Hugh Foley, <i>Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire</i>

The Depiction of Native Hawaiians in American Media

This paper examines the ways in which colonial ideologies influenced the presentation of Native Hawaiians in American media throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands as a U.S. territory in 1898, American cartoonists, advertisers, authors, filmmakers, and others have promoted racist, sexist, and oversexualized versions of Native Hawaiians to the American public because of their deeply ingrained, sometimes unconscious, colonial ways of thinking. Although Indigenous Studies is a growing area of interest in the academy, research on Native Hawaiian media representation and the impact of stereotypes on both Native Hawaiian identity and public views of Native Hawaiians is scarce. This paper uses political cartoons, travel ephemera, film footage, and various forms of print media to bring to light the most prominent stereotypes of Native Hawaiians and explore how the origins of these stereotypes can be traced back to American colonialism. Unlike pre-existing works, this paper scrutinizes various examples of Native Hawaiian media representations from an intersectional perspective, considering racial-, gender-, and sexuality-based approaches. It also critically examines the role of exoticization, instead of focusing on only one of the aforementioned approaches. By outlining the fallacious stereotypes of the Native Hawaiian community and explaining their origins, this paper can help arm the media industry with the necessary tools to create more culturally competent media content.

The emergence and role of Lancaster in Mexican public education

The Lancaster mutual teaching model originated in late 18th century England and quickly spread to the American colonies after receiving positive responses in Europe. In the 1820s, renowned Spanish physician, educator, and publisher Manuel Codorniú Ferreras brought it to Mexico, making outstanding contributions to the newly independent nation in educational philosophy, system, and methods. In the mid-19th century, with the absence of a centralized institution for public education in Mexico, the Lancaster Company took on the significant responsibility of guiding the direction of national public education development. Although this function did not persist for too long due to political changes in Mexico, the educational system continued to play an important role in the Mexican education sector. The Lancaster Company and its teaching system exerted a positive and profound influence on the democratization and secularization of education in Mexico, laying important foundations for the modernization and reform of Mexican education.