American Colonies Research Articles

Critical Race and Religion

Laura McTighe (2020, 299) argues in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion that “Religious Studies has a race problem.” I strongly agree with this argument: not only does the field largely ignore issues of race in its examination of cultural and religious differences, but also the field itself was formed and developed (largely over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in the context of British, continental European, and American colonialism. That is, the field of religious studies has in particular a whiteness problem. In short, the study of religion has the issue of race and racialization at its centre—and thus any attempt to explore issues of critical religion should also embrace critical race theory in all its forms. Drawing on writers such as Sara Ahmed, Aime Cesaire, Angela Y Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison, I will examine some of the contours of what a “Critical Race and Religion” approach may contribute to a decolonized study of religion—including a strong critique of the underlying issues of whiteness (and white supremacy) within the contemporary field.

The long‐run evolution of global real wages

AbstractThis article reviews the literature on comparative real wages in history that has emerged over the past two decades. Research has shown that unskilled men's real wages were higher in England and the Low Countries than in other parts of Europe and Asia from about 1720. Yet 18th‐ and 19th‐century real wages were even higher in the northern American colonies than they were in the European leaders, while those in Latin America were somewhere in the middle of the global wage ladder. This comparative picture is drawn on the basis of unskilled male day wages and various recent contributions focused on specific countries and time periods noting the variation in wage levels and trends for different groups of workers across urban and rural areas and labor contracts, varying days of labor per year, and the crucial and changing contributions of other family members. The latest research also highlights new ways to compute comparative cost‐of‐living indices. Building new datasets to take these issues into account in a new global comparative picture of long‐run real wages is a major area for future research.

The Airplane and the Imperial City: A Brief History of Seattle and American Empire

This essay explores airplane manufacturing in twentieth-century Seattle to trace the correspondence between major developmental moments in the city’s history and broader transitional moments in American empire. In doing so, it argues that Seattle is best understood as an imperial city characterized by four ongoing features: extensive connections beyond the city’s nominal borders; sustained alliance between private commercial interests and the state that made such connections possible; a built environment of technological infrastructure made to serve that alliance; and labor forces, segmented by race, subject to the evolving needs of empire.

Placental Politics: CHamoru Women, White Womanhood, and Indigeneity under US Colonialism in Guam

Book review

Prophetic Witness in the American Empire: A Conversation with Cornel West

Prophetic Witness in the American Empire: A Conversation with Cornel West

비교의 공동체

Contrary to the perception that the social contexts of post-war Korea and Japan were completely different, there are also aspects of the country that were reorganized in a similar way, because post-war Japan and Korea each concealed colonialism and its legacy through aspects of complicity between the nation-state and American imperialism. In addition, the nation-states of the United States, Korea, and Japan deny this similar collusion and abandon their responsibility to respond to colonial victims. In film culture, these phenomenon are explicitly visible in the genres of liberation melodrama, idea picture, and educational documentaries produced under the US military government control in both Japan and Korea. However, at the same time, there were film cultures in Korea and Japan that expressed alternative, or “colonial differences,” and by comparing them, this article focuses on comparative film studies that emphasizes differences based on the binary opposition of Japan = empire and Korea=colony. Inotherwords,thisshowsthat“colonialdifference”andmemoryare not based on the totality of the nation, but lie on various layers such as gender, diaspora, class, and transnational local. This would be a restoration of contemporaneity between Korea and Japan, where they have responsibility to respond to each other.

Анализ современной климатической политики Европейского союза

The world community’s major problem in the XXI century is associated with global warming. In order to address this issue, the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted in 2015. As part of the implementation of the Paris Agreement, on December 11, 2019, the European Union (EU) adopted the European Green Deal (EGD), providing for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. On July 14, 2021, the EU adopted the climate program Fit for 55 aimed at implementing the EGD. On March 8, 2022, the EU adopted an ambitious strategy to stop importing fossil fuels from Russia and transition to renewable energy sources (REPowerEU). Based on the analysis, the article concludes that the modern climate policy of the EU is a logical continuation of the implementation of the Marshall Plan to establish dominance over European countries with the aim of dein-dustrializing them and turning them into US colonies. The European Union, largely as a result of the implemen-tation of this counterproductive climate policy that is contrary to the national interests of the member states, is experiencing stagflation and is gradually losing its competitive position in the global economy. In this new reali-ty, the EU faces the challenge of revising and adjusting climate policy in the region.

In forma pauperis: Indentured Servitude, the Right to Counsel, and White Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Abstract Indentured servitude was an exploitative form of coerced labor in England’s American colonies, but indentured servants were expected to join settler society after completing their terms of indenture, and they possessed clearly defined legal rights and protections in both English and colonial laws, even during their period of servitude. The masters and mistresses of indentured servants sometimes engaged in physical abuse and contractual fraud, but servants could sue their masters or mistresses in court without owing fees, a status termed in forma pauperis. Courts facilitated servant lawsuits and heeded procedural fairness, bringing in compensated witnesses, searching archival records, and even providing pro bono lawyers. It appears that most servants won their cases against their masters and mistresses, obtaining their freedom, their withheld freedom dues, or reimbursement for overlong terms of servitude. Indentured servants’ lawyers affirmed that their clients were rights-bearing members of society, persuasively utilizing terms such as ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ to represent their cases. The access of servants to legal recourse, the courts’ commitment to ensure due process and legal representation, and the frequent victories of servants over their masters demonstrated that indentured servants were regarded as valued members of colonial society in the Chesapeake, and in other colonial regions. Unlike enslaved people, who possessed neither legal rights nor access to the courts, white indentured servants possessed inherent, though limited, rights of freeborn subjects, even if from disenfranchised groups, such as women, children, or those of Irish origin. The legal and social distinctions between servitude and slavery began arising half a century before Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670s, which is conventionally assumed to be a watershed event in the division between indentured servitude and slavery. The affirmation of the rights of indentured servants developed in parallel with the growth of slavery, and contributed to developing ideals of white citizenship.

Fascism and the Trans Villain: Historically Recurring Transphobia in Far-Right Politics


 
 
 
 This article builds a base of historical and theoretical context to understand the resurgence of transphobic propaganda and violence led by the American far-right through an examination of the connections between trans politics and global political economies of capitalism. Through a synthesis of established theories of fascism, a historical analysis of fascism, and a case study of propagandistic transphobia in two American films from the height of the Cold War, I argue that the proliferation of contemporary anti-trans sentiment reflects the state of crisis that the American empire is experiencing as domestic and international resistance threatens its global hegemony. Further I argue that a historical and theoretical examination of fascism and trans issues show the capacity for fascistic anti-trans violence not as a departure from the norm of liberal democratic nation-state systems that developed through the processes of capital, but rather as a constitutive part of that norm. Trans historians must mobilize historical knowledge and practice to disseminate public facing works that furnish a wide base of readers with the tools to understand and contextualize contemporary trans panic as it metastasizes.
 
 
 

Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism

Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism

Latin American Folklore: Roots, Genres, Uniqueness

Latin American folklore is a heterogeneous phenomenon, encompassing different levels, which has been determined by the historical conditions of its formation, existence and evolution. The so-called folklore criollo, which dates back to the Spanish folk poetry brought by the Spaniards to America during the colonial period, is an important part of the Latin American folklore. The specific character of historical and socio-economic circumstances that influenced the formation of the folklore criollo, explain its relatively late formation, as well as the transformation and reinterpretation of the original Spanish popular poetic tradition. As a result of syncretisation, Creole folklore has incorporated various elements of the folk art of the indigenous peoples, including those of African origin. The main genres of Creole folklore are romance, décima (glossa) and copla, which have evolved since their birth in Spain and later in the New World, where they came with waves of Spanish immigrants. The specific conditions of life in the American colonies, in which such psychological qualities as courage, bravery, aggressive ness and violence became the norm of existence, determined the content, motifs and plot of folklore. At the same time, romantic poetry was «folklorised», it was adapted to the collective environment, its themes were simplified. Folk songs and romances were given a sentimental, artificially dramatic character of exaggerated suffering. Romantic songs have achieved great popularity, as they exist today in different Latin American countries in different forms or genres, namely the corrido, the song ranchera, the yaraví, the mulisa, among others. The example of the folklorisation of the romantic style was the tango song that was formed in Argentina and Uruguay as a massive amateur composition in the 1920s. Different genres of Creole folklore are present with their own specificity in all Latin American and Caribbean countries and deserve new studies taking into account new conditions of social and human development.

Compact colonialism: U.S. neocolonialism in Micronesia in the early twenty-first century

ABSTRACT For decades, the United States has administered compacts of free association with the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. Scholars have criticized the United States for using the compacts to limit the sovereignty of the compact states, but they have not determined how the compact states fit into the American empire in the Pacific Ocean. A review of the U.S. documentary record from the early twenty-first century indicates that the United States has ruled the compact states through its own particular form of neocolonialism, or ‘compact colonialism’. Under the compacts, the United States has exercised several powers, including military controls, political controls, economic controls, cultural influence and humanitarian indifference. With this neocolonial approach, the United States has exploited the compact states to maintain a large oceanic empire in the Pacific Ocean.

Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 Tessa Winkelmann

<i>Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946</i> Tessa Winkelmann

“The Best Place to Help the Panthers Is at Home”: Dutch Black Panther Solidarity in Pursuit of a Revolution

In 1969, a group of activists in the Netherlands formed the Solidariteitscomité met de Black Panthers, or Black Panther Solidarity Committee, intended to support the Black Panther Party through a platform of public education, fund-raising, and political protest. Their efforts were part of a broader campaign for European solidarity launched by the African Americans themselves earlier that year. This article is the first to explore how Dutch activists understood their transatlantic partnership with the Black Panthers, arguing that their solidarity served not only to support the party but also to challenge American imperialism and Dutch colonialism in new ways.

Bound Passages

Abstract This article traces the settler-colonial histories of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) in Hawai‘i and Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport (GUM) in Guåhan (Guam) to chart the role of Indigenous dispossession in facilitating ongoing carceral transits across the Pacific. Focusing on the March 2021 deportation of thirty-three Vietnamese refugees from the United States, it situates the deportation flight’s layovers at HNL and GUM within larger processes of racial-colonial violence that constitute the development and operation of both airports. In this sense, HNL and GUM reveal the palimpsestic nature of Hawai‘i and Guåhan as sites of colonial occupation that, in turn, are used to bolster the further transit of global US empire. This essay thus attempts to chart a critical transpacific geography that links the settler-colonial and carceral dimensions of US empire through the issue of Southeast Asian deportation.

Imperial Gift

Abstract This article theorizes and historicizes soap, a medical “gift” distributed by the US military to villages and hamlets in South Vietnam, as a commodity and as an infrastructure in the American war in Vietnam. During the war, soap not only operated as a tool to clean those the US military deemed dirty and uncivilized but also brokered the ideological movement of empire from the nation-state to the occupied regions of the Vietnamese South. Wartime US humanitarianism proffered soap as a counterinsurgent weapon of soft power and as an infrastructural poetic that securitized US empire against the rising tide of communist insurgency. Reading against the hegemonic archival practices that venerate the gifting of soap as benevolent militarism, the article moves to examine the anarchic practice of South Vietnamese black marketeering, which redeployed soap as an illegal market commodity to intercept the movement of US empire and, as a practice that arose in response to wartime capitalism and militarization, allowed natives to command new social relations at the cost of disrupting the Republic of Vietnam’s flows of capital and the United States’ ongoing war campaign. As an informal, opaque, and yet thriving infrastructure of its own, the black market fostered insurgent survival strategies that repurposed military supplies and gifts as versatile commodities, allowing even soap to escape its original containment as a civilizing agent and giving it new uses and meanings.

Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García

<i>Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture</i> by Marilisa Jiménez García

Blood Meridian's Chronotopic Gates: Reading Cormac McCarthy through the Lens of a Literary-Historical GIS

This geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) provides a literary geography analysis that plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to map the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope. Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter the threat of Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico. Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as ‘cartographical novel’ illuminating its literary geography as a melange, spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval and Indigenous mythologies. The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the ‘Kid’, across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.

Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar (review)

Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar (review)

Statebuilding and the Origins of the “American Empire”: Towards the Problem of Legitimizing Sovereign Inequality in the 21st Century

In recent decades, “statebuilding” policies in the Greater Middle East have been used by Washington as a tool for forging an “American empire” based on unequal relations between the U.S. and its dependent regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, current research focuses mainly on the instruments for implementing these policies and ensuring the acceptance of new political and economic institutions by the local population. Unlike the established approaches, the author examines Washington’s statebuilding efforts as a specific practice of legitimacy aimed at entrenching sovereign inequality and institutionalizing the US political control over “client-regimes.” The study draws on the theoretical legacy of the English school, which views “legitimacy” as a phenomenon inextricably linked with “international society,” comprising a group of states bound by common goals, institutions, and values. The legitimation strategies adopted by members of this society involve the performance of various international roles through which states acquire recognized statuses, rights and obligations. Focusing on the US roles such as “imperial power” and “patron,” the author concludes that Washington’s statebuilding efforts were aimed at linking the US interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq with the collective goals of international society, and thus served to legitimize inequitable relations with “client-states” under the formal legal equality of members of international society. Therefore, the application of the proposed approach helps to shed light on the underexplored aspects of the legitimizing instruments of the US dominance and the means of institutionalizing sovereign inequality inherent in the “American empire” in the 21st century.