Imperial Geopolitics Research Articles

The crucible of altitude: Situated knowledges, Himalayan sciences, and imperial geopolitics

The crucible of altitude: Situated knowledges, Himalayan sciences, and imperial geopolitics

Decolonizing knowledge of and from Okinawa

ABSTRACT This paper explores the militarized situation of Okinawa Island and the ongoing struggles and challenges that Okinawans continue to confront. Particular focus is placed on how Okinawans challenge dominant colonial forms of knowledge, which assert that the U.S. military presence on the island is beneficial for Okinawan and Japanese people. After contextualizing Okinawa Island within contemporary American imperial geopolitics and outlining the current state of the island, the paper looks at three different, yet closely integrated, ways in which Okinawans, led by activists and progressive local officials, challenge the dominant narrative on the U.S. military. By questioning dominant assumptions about security, a base-dependent economy, and Okinawans’ indigenous status, these movements contribute to the decolonization of knowledge, an important step toward the demilitarization of the island. The paper concludes with a discussion of remaining challenges for decolonial knowledge production.

When Asian Americans Return to Asia: Return Narratives, Transpacific Imagination, and the Post/Cold War

By focusing on Asian American return narratives as a symbolic indicator of a shift in transpacific relations, this article attempts to address two questions: first, how will a focus on return experiences engage and reframe transpacific imperial geopolitics thatcreated and sustainedAsian American literature, and second, how will a focus on the “post/Cold War”rather than on globalization as a temporal frame challenge the transpacificimagination in American studiesas a cultural and economic narrative of immigration, integration,and salvationthat purports to transcend Cold War divisions.Thearticleanalyses Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life(2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad(2021)to consider how post-1990s Asian American return narratives rearticulatecontemporary geopolitics. It will conclude with a reflection on the Orientalismof Asian Americanliteraturein the treacherous imaginaryof transpacific futures.

Melville's Quixoticism and the Modern World-System

Melville's Quixoticism and the Modern World-System

Theorising from the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路)

As frame for the set that follows, this article first considers the range of theoretical interpretations of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our focus, however, is on a related yet distinct set of questions. Rather than theorising BRI per se, we approach BRI as a source of theoretical implications and reflection – asking what it signals and implies for wider cultural, economic, political, social and urban theories, and for histories of and afterlives of imperial geopolitics.

Mapping Skies and Continents: The Production of Two Portuguese Scientific Atlases in the Era of Napoleonic Expansion (1799-1813)

To what extend the circulation of scientific knowledge was shaped by the European imperial geopolitics in the late-eighteenth century? Recruited to fulfill tasks increasingly considered essential to the very workings of imperial administrations, scientific practitioners of the time paradoxically seem to make use precisely of this encroachment in state apparatuses to secure some degree of autonomy for their nascent field. Thus, every material form of circulation of scientific information must be ultimately understood as an act of political consequences. Here we present these ideas through the analysis of two concrete scientific artifacts, which can exemplify the circulation of scientific information inside and across empires: two atlases, one terrestrial and one celestial (the latter being a version of Flamsteed’s famous atlas of 1729, by way of intermediate French editions), produced in Portugal at the turn of the nineteenth century. Discarding the simple assumption that such cartographic artifacts might have a “utilitarian” use to Portuguese imperial administration, we aim to insist on their political and communicative nature, grounded on their modes of participation in trans-imperial pathways of circulation of knowledge, people, practices, and models of scientific authority (entangling Britain, France, and the Americas in multiple time scales). We also highlight how the atlases contribute to the affirmation of new patriotic science in Portugal, and explore the markedly didactic vocation of both objects, which also stress the question of the recruitment and reproduction of a new kind of imperial elite.

The Renaissance of Imperial Geopolitics.

Recebido: 12/02/2021 
 Aprovado: 29/04/2021
 My article aims at focusing on the fascist rhetoric over two territories, Malta and Corsica, the object of the irredentist goals of the fascist government during the twenties. Firstly, I will trace a general outline of the fascist geopolitical vision for the Mediterranean with reference to the Mussolinian policies towards France and Great Britain. Following this, I will examine the imperialist rhetoric promulgated through the magazine “Geopolitica” and the touring guides of Touring Club Italiano. 
 Keywords: Fascism, Italy, Malta, Corsica, geopolitics

Making Deserts, Building States

Making Deserts, Building States Emmanuel A. Velayos Larrabure Javier Uriarte. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2020. 306 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-6692-8 Javier Uriarte. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2020. 306 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-6692-8 In this outstanding book, Javier Uriarte studies the relationship between state consolidation, war, and deserts in travel narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America. The Desertmakers explores the narrative construction of deserts in four different war contexts: the Paraguay War (1864–1970), the bloody conflicts during Uruguayan militarism (1876–1890), the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina (1878–1885), and the War of Canudos in Brazil (1896–1897). The book argues that travel narratives reveal that state consolidation in Latin America depended on "desert-making," that is, the desertification and emptying of territories that the state could appropriate and incorporate into the national space. The desert is a mainstream trope in postcolonial Latin American letters. In the aftermath of the independence movements, intellectuals imagined deserts as wastelands that needed to be controlled and rendered productive by nation-states. By the late nineteenth century, that control replaced the desert's trope, as concrete capitalist operations on the seized lands took over literary discourses on idle wilderness. However, Uriarte argues that the end of literary deserts did not coincide with the establishment of productive spaces, for it was first necessary to make deserts real: to turn the metaphors of emptiness into real voids. Before states appropriated the desert, it needed to be emptied, and its inhabitants decimated. According to this book, it was through internal and external wars that Latin American states transformed imagined idle territories into "desertified" spaces, into voids that could be seized and inserted in a capitalist logic of production. As Uriarte puts it, "a necessary condition for this end of the desert as perceived by the state is the creation of a new void, one that previously existed only in discourse" (2). As the desert was mainly a metaphoric construction in the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals did not need to travel to it to depict it: they just needed to read about it. Instead, in the second half of the century, the concrete desertification triggered by wars required that writers travel to conflict zones. Hence, the relevance of travel narratives in this book. The corpus includes both non-fictional and fictional travel accounts: Richard Burton's Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870), William Henry Hudson's novel The Purple Land (1885), several texts on Patagonia by Francisco Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões (1902). [End Page 198] The study of texts by world travelers like Burton (Chapter 1) and W. H. Hudson (Chapter 2) situates desertification and state consolidation within imperial geopolitics. State control over the territory was a tool for national sovereignty and, at the same time, an instrument to establish neocolonial relations of exploitation that benefited the British Empire. This imperial perspective is productive in discussing "desert-making" beyond the strict national lenses in previous studies on the historical and cultural meanings of deserts by Tulio Halperín Donghi and Fermín Rodríguez. Chapter 1 analyzes how Burton depicted the neocolonial relations that the British Empire sought to establish in South America, his refusal to follow British orders, and his take on the battlefields of the Paraguayan War "as deserted and ruined spaces" (46). Chapter 2 examines Hudson's novel on Uruguay as a critique against "the official effort to delimit, to control, to oversee movement" (90). The Purple Land's main character, Richard Lamb, resisted state and imperial attempts at controlling spaces and peoples' movements by embracing the "uncivilized" and unproductive rural ways of living that the militarist Uruguayan state sought to eliminate. The readings of Moreno's texts (Chapter 3) and da Cunha's prose (Chapter 4) display how the imperial logic of domination was replicated by the violence that Latin American urban elites exercised over rural territories and populations. Chapter 3 studies Moreno's writings on Patagonia in the aftermath of the Conquest...

Base Built in the Middle of ‘Rice Fields’: A Politics of Ignorance in Okinawa

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of ignorance in contemporary imperial geopolitics and the political geography of islands. Ignorance and imperialism have gone hand in hand since as early as the European age of ‘discovery’. The idea of empty spaces empowered earlier European colonial expansion by ignoring the existence of non-white indigenous people and communities. A few centuries later, the cartographic discourse of empty spaces still appears to be at work today in islands such as Okinawa where US bases have been stationed since the mid-twentieth century. The paper conducts a study of ignorance, or an agnotological study, of Okinawa. There has been a growing interest in studies of ignorance in the past few years, notably in sociology, science and technology studies, and studies of race and racism. Yet, ignorance as a focal point of analysis seems to be underdeveloped in studies of geopolitics and islands despite that the production of ignorance contributes to the maintaining of existing imperial spatial orders. The paper particularly examines the dominant discourses of US officials around the history of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which often ignore, or disguise at best, the colonial foundation of military bases in Okinawa.

Field Notes on the Politics of Veteran Care

ABSTRACT The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and ‘unthinkable’ character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike have prior investments. I relate two instances in which unexpected veteran interlocutors challenged the ‘truth’ of stereotypical figurations that I also aimed to critique in my work. Exploring these confrontational co-productions of critique, I argue for an ethnography of military sociality embedded in informants’ own capacities as critics, in which anthropology is accountable for its enmeshment in imperial geopolitics and militarised modes of care.

Geopolitics of disregard: Living a colonial life in Okinawa

This article aims to make a contribution to the field of critical geopolitics by exploring two rather underexamined facets of contemporary imperial geopolitics. First, the article suggests that the concept of disregard developed by Stoler can shed new light on everyday life at the margins of imperial geopolitics. Stoler argues that living a colonial life entails acts of disregarding certain forms of violence and injustice without fully accepting the colonial system as a whole. In conjunction with Memmi's earlier portrait of the colonised, Stoler's writing helps to understand the complexities and ambivalence that the colonised go through living in and off an empire. Second, the article demonstrates how practices of disregard play out in the (post)colonial and militarised context of Okinawa. Despite its significance in US military mapping, Okinawa remains an understudied site in the field of critical geopolitics. Situating Okinawa in the broader context of imperial geopolitics and its double colonial present, the article explores how islanders come to live their colonial life and make a living whilst disregarding certain colonial conditions.

“Problems of the Far East”: Imperial Geopolitics Reflected in the Korean Travelogues of British Officials, 1889–1900

“Problems of the Far East”: Imperial Geopolitics Reflected in the Korean Travelogues of British Officials, 1889–1900

Food supply and government: A ‘victualized’ reading of European modernity

The food supply has been a formative space in the creation and exercise of centralized governing authority in Western Europe. Similar to warmaking, bureaucratization or market integration, governing agriculture has had a constitutive importance to modern European politics. One goal of this essay is to elucidate the often forgotten agrarian underpinnings of European modernity. A concurrent goal is to investigate, through a set of detailed empirical cases, some of the decisive strategic configurations through which ‘the agrarian’ and ‘the political’ have been conjoined across a history that spans a period of time from the Absolutist State to the European Union. Specifically, the essay interrogates how the management of the food supply and agrarian life were central to the projects of state formation, urban policing, imperial geopolitics, and Europe’s postwar reconstruction.

Past and Prospects of Imperial Geopolitics

Past and Prospects of Imperial Geopolitics

Manuel I of Portugal and the End of the Toleration of Islam in Castile: Marriage Diplomacy, Propaganda, and Portuguese Imperialism in Renaissance Europe, 1495-1505

In 1505, King Manuel I of Portugal (1495-1521) ordered the public printing of a letter officially addressed to Pope Julius II. In the letter, the Portuguese King defended his role as a champion of Christendom and scourge of Islam in the Indian Ocean. The most remarkable claim made by Manuel in this letter was that he was directly involved in persuading the Catholic monarchs of Spain Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragón to put an end to the toleration of Islam in Castile in 1501. This article focuses on this claim and whether or not it can merely be dismissed as the rhetoric of bombastic propaganda. It analyzes Luso-Spanish relations between 1495 and 1505 and highlights documentary evidence proving that Manuel did indeed put pressure on his Spanish neighbors to abolish the toleration of Islam during the tortuous negotiations surrounding his marriage to the Spanish princess Maria in 1501. Beyond assessing the historical significance of the letter, this article highlights the intricate connections between Portuguese imperial geopolitics and Iberian dynastic politics during this crucial period in the history of both the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.

Guerras interétnicas y anticoloniales: “bárbaros” y españoles en las tierras bajas del pacífico, siglos XVI y XVII

Desde la segunda mitad del siglo XVI hasta finales del siglo siguiente loshabitantes tanto indios como españoles de las tierras bajas del Pacífico delas Gobernaciones de Popayán y Antioquia fueron sometidos a largos periodosde guerra. Primero, la presión ejercida por los cristianos desde un largo rosariode ciudades que se extendían desde Pasto hasta la ciudad de Antioquia, provocó que las naciones indias lucharan entre ellas por el control de las tierras, los hombres y el oro. Segundo, la incursión de los españoles desde la cordillera Occidental hacia las tierras bajas conllevó no sólo a la ampliación de la frontera hispana y mestiza, sino también a retrocesos que mantuvo en vilo las comunicaciones entre los centros urbanos y obligó al despoblamiento dealgunas regiones importantes para la geopolítica imperial.

Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Mediterranean region emerged as a crucial site for the security of the British Empire route to India and South Asia, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Military stations served as trans-imperial sites, connecting Britain to India through the flow of military manpower, commodities, information, and bodily experiences across the empire from 1850 through 1880. By examining the material remnants of the “avian imperial archive” (avian lists, bird skins, eggs, travel writing), I demonstrate how British military ornithology helped to materialize imaginatively and empirically the British Mediterranean as a transitional region for the physical and cultural acclimatization of British officers en route to and from India and to extend British imperial interests into North Africa. As this article reveals, the production of zoogeography by British military officers in the Mediterranean was coconstituted by imperial military geopolitics.

A Propos of the Euro-Zone crisis: From ‘Uneven and Combined Development’ (UCD) to ‘Global Fault-lines’ (GF)

This article advances a crisis theory of financialisation and imperial geo-politics in order to recast key concepts and causal parameters related to the sources of debt and the way in which the Euro-Atlantic area is in danger of complete disintegration. It juxtaposes the concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ (UCD) to that of ‘global fault-lines’ (GF), showing the advantages enjoyed by the latter with the inclusion of geo-political and security dimensions as co-constitutive explanatory variables in the understanding of economic crises in general and of the Euro-zone crisis in particular.

Greg Malone Don't tell the Newfoundlanders The true story of Newfoundland's confederation with Canada

Greg Malone Don't tell the Newfoundlanders The true story of Newfoundland's confederation with Canada Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 314pp., $29.95 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-370-40133-5The incorporation of Newfoundland (and Labrador) as Canada's tenth province remains a highly contested political event for many, including Greg Malone, the author of the recently published Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders} Malone, perhaps best known as founding member of the comedy troupe CODCO, holds both a BA and an honorary doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and is well known in the province for his political activism, an activism that inspired him to write this serious book.1 2 The Newfoundlanders offers a detailed exposition of primary and secondary historical documents. The result is an expose of particular value to anyone interested in the complexity of post-WWII geopolitics. Malone's primary argument is that the Terms of Union are something rotten at the heart of the Canadian state, negotiated as they were illegally without the involvement of a democratically elected government of Newfoundland. Above all, his work reveals how those processes if not quite qualifying as a conspiracy at the very least reveal the Janus-faced nature of great power politics. The collection of primary sources, and the racialized and gendered discourses they reveal at the highest level of colonial and imperial geopolitics, is of particular value for those readers inter- ested in the practices of international elites during the fervent era that followed the Second World War.The Newfoundlanders can be logically divided into three chronological units. The first section covers the pre-1933 history of Newfoundland and explains the unique constitutional arrangement of the Island at the start of the Second World War. Chapters five through twelve cover the actual processes of Confederation, including the various delegations to Ottawa and London, the national convention, the referenda of 1948, and the negotiations of the Terms of Union with Canada. Finally, the author provides a personal interpretation to put the historical record into perspective for the current era, considering the implications of the Terms of Union for Newfoundland and Canadian politics in the 21st century.Opening with an overview of 19th and 20th century political history of Newfoundland, Malone emphasizes what he believes are the finer points of colonial administration in North America to set the stage for his primary argument: that Newfoundland's confederation with Canada was illegal based on the suspension of responsible government in 1933 by the British. From there he moves through the tale of confederation from 1941 to 1949, allowing the primary sources to speak for themselves in places. Intermixed with lengthy excerpts from both primary and secondary sources, Malone's prose, however, serves less as analysis of the historical record than as a thread connecting the myriad sources together in a narrative structure, providing background information on the cast of characters involved, and attempting to draw the reader to the author's point of view.The documents include excerpts from correspondence within the Department of External Affairs, communiques between Canadian High Commissioner Scott MacDonald and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, as well as documents composed by John Maynard Keynes, Sir Winston Churchill, and Lords Amulree, Beaverbrook, and Cranborne. From the interweaving of the words of practitioners of high geopolitics, readers gain a glimpse into the back room dealings that led to the disappearance of the little country that couldn't: the little country that couldn't exercise its right to self-determination laid out in the Atlantic Charter, ironically signed off its own shores, guaranteeing to the peoples of Europe the right to choose their own destiny; the little country that couldn't forge an alliance between sectarian and class divides that great powers have exploited since ancient times to divide and conquer those they rule. …

Interrogating scarcity: how to think about 'resource-scarce settings'

The idea of resource scarcity permeates health ethics and health policy analysis in various contexts. However, health ethics inquiry seldom asks—as it should—why some settings are ‘resource-scarce’ and others not. In this article I describe interrogating scarcity as a strategy for inquiry into questions of resource allocation within a single political jurisdiction and, in particular, as an approach to the issue of global health justice in an interconnected world. I demonstrate its relevance to the situation of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with brief descriptions of four elements of contemporary globalization: trade agreements; the worldwide financial marketplace and capital flight; structural adjustment; imperial geopolitics and foreign policy. This demonstration involves not only health care, but also social determinants of health. Finally, I argue that interrogating scarcity provides the basis for a new, critical approach to health policy at the interface of ethics and the social sciences, with specific reference to market fundamentalism as the value system underlying contemporary globalization.