American Colonies Research Articles

Understanding the disconnection in royal colonial leadership of the british Commanders-in-Chief (1775-1783): Gage, W. Howe, and Clinton

When the British lost their American colonial territories in 1781 at the end of the American Revolutionary War, it was the culmination of events that began during the conclusion of the American Theater of the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War, 1763). Examples include changing dynamics in British Parliamentary charters, the involvement of American international allies (primarily France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic) seeking retribution for the French and Indian War, shortages of supplies and munitions, misjudgments regarding Loyalist support, and independent British generals failing to coordinate their military offensives. However, one less-discussed example is the disconnection in leadership styles among the three British Commanders-in-Chief of the American Colonies from 1775 to 1783: Thomas Gage, William Howe, and Henry Clinton. This paper assesses their leadership failures as they navigated their varying styles during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire

Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire

Transnational Queer Materialism

The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.

Sculpted Memories: Apolinario Mabini’s Memorialization and Chamorro–Filipino Relations in Guam

Abstract: Filipino revolutionary Apolinario Mabini’s incarceration in Asan Beach on Guam from 1901–1903 continues to have political implications today, as evidenced by Chamorro-led pushback against Filipino-sponsored Mabini memorials in the village of Asan. Much of this debate is centered around differences between Chamorro and Filipino memories about Asan, which stems from the US empire’s containment of their relations. Through applying an abolitionist geographical critique to US Naval archives and oral history interviews of Chamorros and Filipinos in Guam, this article unpacks the role that US militarization’s carceral logics play in transforming Mabini’s memory into a marker of containment for Chamorros, Filipinos, and Guam’s landscapes and waterscapes. In centering an Indigenous and Filipino feminist reading of colonial archives and Chamorro–Filipino relations, I identify moments when Chamorros and Filipinos have (re)mapped alternative modes of relation beyond the containment of Chamorros’ ties to place and the US military’s reliance on Filipinos as a source of labor for militarized infrastructure.

Terraforming Yemen: Geoeconomic imperialism, the UAE and the southern secessionists

This article argues that the intervention in Yemen (2015–present) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) exemplified a new phenomenon, of postmodern small-state imperialism enabled by globalized, extra-European capital flows. The particular tactic deployed for these imperial purposes was terraforming, which had a tangible effect on the country’s geopolitical map. It involved a complex web of ground troops, support for surrogates and mercenaries, economic investments, and strategic concentration on securing the entire Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden littoral. This effort had the positive goal of securing westward oil exports by the UAE and of creating a marine security environment conducive to Emirati administration of the port of Aden. Especially post-2019, it is argued, the UAE did not merely opportunistically pursue its STC policy under the wings of Saudi Arabia but rather confronted its larger partner, bombing Saudi proxies at key moments and acting more like a rival than a bandwagoning ally. This Emirati enterprise was shaped by the interests of Abu Dhabi and its local proxies rather than by US or European imperialism, though it sufficiently accorded with US policy to receive no pushback from Washington.

John Witherspoon and Slavery: Ideology versus Praxis

This article reassesses the life and legacy of John Knox Witherspoon on the basis of his relationship to slavery. It argues that Witherspoon's ideological commitment to Presbyterianism came into constant tension with the realities of slavery both in his native Scotland and in the burgeoning American colony he eventually called home. Three snapshots in Witherspoon's life encapsulate this tension: his interaction with Jamie Montgomery, an enslaved man whom Witherspoon baptized in Scotland; his contributions to the scheme to train two free African Americans—John Quamine and Bristol Yamma—for their mission to Africa; and his tutoring of John Chavis, a free Black man from Virginia, at the same time he held property in slaves. Most accounts of Witherspoon's life fail to interrogate these snapshots and so fail to grasp a nuanced portrait of the imminent figure. This article parses through his unequal treatment of the African Americans he taught and the African Americans he enslaved to deliver a new reading of Witherspoon. This reading, in turn, maps onto a broader reconsideration of the founding principles of the early United States.

Britain’s Decision to Push for Canadian Confederation

Prior to Canadian confederation the British Empire pursued a policy of scripter control over the British North American colonies by the imperial metropole. However, in the decades leading up to Canadian confederation the British Empire pursued a policy of consolidation of British North America and laxer control allowing for autonomy by Canadians. By providing the historical analysis of the decades leading up to Canadian confederation we can understand why this policy shifts of the British Empire into allowing confederation. A number of radical things will occur in the decades from the American Revolution in 1776 to Canadian confederation in 1867 that will allow for this to occur. The growth of the American Republic, Internal rebellions in Canada, and of course imperial shifting of policy towards India will allow confederation. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the Seven Year War ended and France’s North American colonies, particularly Quebec, were handed over to the British. The British Empire would only enjoy complete dominance of North America until the creation of the new American Republic. For the next century despite the threat posed by the United States of America, Britain’s North American colonies remained divided and spread over the vast expanse of the Canadian North America. It was only in the 1860’s when the British Empire’s worldwide imperial goal shifted that Canadian Confederation became possible. Confederation of all colonies bordering the United States happen occur over a short period of time. Britain’s participation in the Canadian confederation process was key in preventing colonies from being annexed by the United States and facilitating confederation.

The Ubiquity of Asia: Cai Guo-Qiang's Fireworks and Spectral Marxism

Asia is everywhere. Asia feels ubiquitous, from soft to hard power; from high to low culture; and from the Americas to Africa. In the American cycle of capital accumulation, under Giovanni Arrighi's schema, the overrepresentation of the United States was marked through representation-based and symbolic notions like Disneyfication (Jean Baudrillard) and “the ascendancy of whiteness” (Rey Chow). Under our contemporary Asian cycle of capital accumulation, this geographic area's affective ubiquity appears much like that of the US by saturating global public sentiment. However, considering that Asia's ubiquity emerges across sites like China, South Korea, India, and Japan, among others, what might we use to capture this sense of affective intensity and spread beyond representation-based frames? More specifically, how do we contend with geographic space within racial capital today, and how might we update our models for understanding race and capital so as to fully grapple with this transitional moment from American empire to Global Asia? Under the American cycle, representational frames like Orientalism and white supremacy emerged to understand Asian racialization. Can these frames still help explain the ubiquity of Asia today? This essay explores how we might discuss the subject beyond representation and in light of the ubiquity of Asia and what methods we deploy for Marxist analysis. This essay focuses less on Asian bodies and Asian spaces and turns toward aesthetic objects and practices that engage the affective sublime. More specifically, it examines the aesthetics of fireworks for what they might offer as a lexicon to contend with the transition in cycles of capital accumulation and changes in our ideas of space and race. The article thus turns to the artist Cai Guo-Qiang for insight on the subject amid contemporary racial capital and the methods available for critique.

“Woman” and Diasporic Kurdish Identity in the United States

Abstract There is a growing literature on gender and feminist theory in the Middle East now. However, there has been little work on Kurdish diasporas and gender in the United States. This article examines how US diasporic Kurdish performances of gender and narrations of gender work to create the figure of the “Kurdish woman.” Instead of falling into the trap of Orientalist constructions of womanhood, Kurdish diasporas imagine “Kurdish woman” as a way to challenge nation-state assimilation projects and erasure by practicing identity at the intersections of ethnicity, religion, gender, and race. The category of “woman” becomes an important venue to manage statelessness, create an important archive for Kurds, challenge ongoing colonialism in Kurdistan, and challenge US imperialism. Therefore “Kurdish woman” constitutes an important spatial and historical terrain for Kurdish women and Kurdish men to manage their racialization across national contexts and partake in the racialization of “others.” “Woman” is activated in the service of difference as a means to showcase the heterogeneity within Kurdish communities and expound on the relations Kurds in the US diaspora have with nation, religion, history, and resistance.

Countertopographies of copper: Martha Rosler, Chris Kraus and the Great Arizona Copper Strike of 1983–1986

Chris Kraus is often read as a chronicler of women artists’ experience: their frustrated desires, stifled creativity and stolen labour. But while these are the struggles that her protagonists face, the novel sets such struggles within the pressing context of American Empire's expansion and reorganisation in the post-Vietnam era. The juxtaposition between these levels is what generates the drama of Kraus’ work. Foregrounding these juxtapositions, this article situates Kraus’ novels within a longer tradition of feminist conceptual artists like Martha Rosler who took the labour and domination of predominantly white middle-class housewives as a standpoint from which to attempt to understand the expansion of US-backed global capitalism. Specifically, the article draws on the concept of ‘countertopographies’ developed by feminist geographer Cindi Katz to argue that Rosler and Kraus’ work offers a form of ‘countertopographic aesthetics’. That is, they both turn to the sphere of the reproductive as a site from which to map the uneven effects of global capitalism, while also foregrounding their own uneasy relationship with the imperialist project of mapping itself, by drawing attention to the ideological practices and limits of their very mappings. To illustrate this claim, the article concludes by turning to a partially buried event in Kraus’ Summer of Hate (2012): the 1983 Clifton-Morenci Copper Strike, a crucial but often overlooked flashpoint in the roll-out of neoliberalism. This eighteen-month strike was fought by a largely Mexican-American workforce, and the Women's Auxiliary, who joined a long history of working-class housewives like the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo X in Bolivia in becoming strike leaders. I argue that the strike is both crucial to the conjecture that Kraus’ narrative traces, and also illuminating of the limit point of the protagonists’ politics and the form of mapping that is possible from such a perspective.

Political theology from the global south: Enrique Dussel and the poetics of liberation

In recent decades, thinkers like Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben have argued for a serious political engagement with early Christian thought and its emphasis on collectivity and community. Notwithstanding their important theoretical contributions, these writers often remain within a limited Eurocentric framework, foreclosing the possibility of a truly decolonial political theology. Crucially, their relatively recent reappraisals tend to ignore important precursors of Christian Marxism from the Global South, namely liberation theology and the philosophy of liberation, as elaborated by the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. This essay contextualizes Dussel’s liberational thought in the contexts of political theology and literary representation. It pays particular attention to Dussel’s study of the Theological Metaphors of Marx by synthesizing a model of literary inquiry based on his philosophy and applying it to a reading of counter-hegemonic poetry by the Caribbean poet Pedro Mir, namely his long poem “Countersong to Walt Whitman.” This reading makes explicit the implicit theological dimension of Mir’s poetic text. Finally, the essay conceptualizes this interpretive model as a poetics of liberation: a mode of engagement with mutually determining discourses – politics, poetics, aesthetics – as well as a mode of reading which unravels the transformation of these discourses in lyrical forms. Writing from the periphery of the US empire, Mir therefore constructs a mode of address which arms itself with both political and theological discourses, however implicitly. To the empire’s miraculous state of exception, Mir counterpoises a redemptive state of rebellion.

Empire of Portland Cement, Concrete Blocks, and Specialty Shingles

Abstract The article examines the close collaboration between Protestant missionaries and expatriate American construction entrepreneurs in the early 1900s in Puerto Rico. The construction work done by the Czech American architect Antonin Nechodoma (1877–1928), the builder Frank Bond Hatch (1871–1925), and Protestant missionaries represent an instance of this collaboration, which led to the adoption of Portland cement products in the construction of church buildings (Beatriz del Cueto, 2016). Nechodoma’s contribution to the development of a religious architectural language on behalf of Protestant missionaries has been largely neglected. While Nechodoma’s figure has gathered popular attention of late, the aim of this article is to situate changes in the design and construction of ecclesiastic structures associated with Methodism within the larger context of American imperialist expansionism and political change in Puerto Rico. Examined collectively, the new religious buildings of the period 1898–c. 1927 reveal the implantation of a new religious colonialist architectural aesthetic.

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848-1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848-1870

Muybridge and the Imperial Pacific: Fashioning Histories of Empire and the Coffee State, 1867–1876

This essay discusses both the continuities and discontinuities in Eadweard Muybridge’s survey photography of the western United States and the Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico in relation to histories of empire and capital expansion. Muybridge’s photographic career followed the frontiers of US empire and capital across the Pacific Rim, and his work tended to reflect those perspectives by naturalizing the temporalities of global capital and US empire, even as it foreclosed alternate subaltern histories. Photography’s role was not passive: it participated with steam power in the integration of these regions by reimagining the disparate spaces it depicted as interconnected by the infrastructure lain by the federal government and global markets. Yet photography’s role also varied as Muybridge moved from the settler colonial context of California to societies like Guatemala with deep colonial roots. During the Liberal reforms of Justo Rufino Barrios, Muybridge’s album refashions Guatemala as a modernizing “coffee state” on the frontier of civilization. Analyzing Muybridge’s photographs alongside state archives that managed these reforms reveals how the creation of the coffee state was both a material and contested cultural production that repressed Indigenous histories of struggle, dispossession, and forced labor by representing the land and people within global currents of commodification and the photographic exhibition of Indigenous persons.

Genocide of the Population of Rwanda in 1994 as an Episode in the History of Neocolonialism

The article examines the factors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda: the main economic, political and ideological prerequisites for the mass extermination of the country’s population are briefly described, the causes of the events that were the main milestones of the genocide are revealed, and the main beneficiaries of that process are identified. For comprehensive coverage of the events, the author uses not only materials confirming the initial version of the general course of those events, but also publications of recent years showing the one-sidedness of the old version of the Rwandan genocide. The materials published in recent years allow us to determine the role of American imperialism as the first most important factor, and French imperialism as the second most important factor in the events of 1994 in Rwanda. Those materials also clarify the connection between, on the one hand, the clash of positions of the United States and France and, on the other hand, the clash of radical circles of Hutu and Tutsi in the course of both the preparation and implementation of the genocide, and the subsequent clarification by historians and lawyers of the truth about it.

“Beyond Railroads and Internment”? Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature and the Foundations of Asian American Literary Studies

This article sees post–World War II wartime incarceration literature as a multigenerational corpus and reassesses the handling of this material in Asian American literary criticism and cultural analysis. As a way of addressing the expanding corpus of wartime incarceration literature, which includes generations of descendant writers, the article proposes a cognitive mapping of the ten major spaces of Japanese American Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) mass incarceration sites, which were built in spatial overlap or in geographic proximity to Native American historic sites of violent conflict and confrontation throughout the nineteenth century. It argues for the centrality of this intergenerational Japanese American corpus in Asian American and US literary and cultural studies, anchored as the body of work is in the historical trajectories of US imperialism and settler colonialism.

The Small Wars Doctrine of the US Marine Corps and Colonial Experience of the European Powers

The rapid transformation of the current world order excites renewed interest of the expert community in the phenomenon of empire (as a form of the organization of political life). And since the United States plays a central role in this transformation, the history of the Pax Americana, its formation and development, both at the level of the idea and in the field of real politics is of particular relevance. The author argues that clarification of the role and significance of the colonial background in the projection of US military-political power in the late 19th — early 21st centuries allows for better understanding of the theory and practice of international relations both in the era of ‘high imperialism’ and world wars of the 20th century, and in the context of transition from global colonial empires to nuclear superpowers. It may also be instrumental in addressing the deepening contradictions between advocates of a ‘global leadership’ concept and proponents of a multipolar world during the post-Cold War period. In this regard, the paper examines the works of the US military theorists of the late 19th − first half of the 20th centuries that focused on the colonial experience of the leading European powers, as well as the experience gained from interventions involving the US Army and Marine Corps. Special emphasis is given to the concept of ‘small wars’. Building on a wide array of primary sources, presented both by the works of military experts, direct participants in various counterinsurgency operations in the colonies, as well as by the teaching materials and field manuals of the US Marine Corps, the author traces the evolution of this concept which implied establishment of external management and/or control through military and police measures. This allows the author to restore the historical genealogy of current models of internal security promoted in American foreign policy in conditions of proliferating, protracted, and increasingly hybrid civil conflicts. The author concludes that in the interwar period the US law enforcement agencies pragmatically implemented the relevant experience of global empires in Latin American countries within the framework of the Monroe Doctrine, while regarding European powers as political rivals. It is noted that conflicting imperatives of asymmetric and conventional threats to US national security urge researchers and practitioners to revisit after a post-Vietnam period of neglect the approaches of colonial empires to the conduct of small wars and to adapt them to modern conditions. The findings broaden the understanding of the modern leading powers’ approaches to internal security models transfer, as well as of its limits.

Common Sense of a Wealth Tax

Thomas Paine’s writing helped spur the American colonies to independence and ensure that the new nation would be a republic, not a monarchy. In light of the renewed interest in wealth taxes, this article provides a close examination of Thomas Paine’s wealth tax proposal in the second volume of The Rights of Man. Unlike Paine’s proposal to tax inheritances, his 1792 proposal to tax wealth on an annual basis is often overlooked. The article identifies Paine’s various design specifications, provides original estimates of the impact of Paine’s wealth tax proposal within his own time period and as applied to billionaires today, and discusses ambiguities in the proposal. The article then places Paine in conversation with the contemporary wealth tax policy debate and demonstrates how Paine informs both the design and evaluation of tax policy. Lastly, the article clarifies the relationship between democratic ideals and taxation, portraying tax policy as a normative expression of republican ideals.

Imagining Freedom in Slavery’s Future: Iron City ’s Fugitive Othertime in the US Carceral Empire-State

Abstract: This essay examines Black political activism during the Korean War in publications that defined their present moment as slavery’s future and characterized slavery and antiblack racism as part of an ongoing war against Black people, connected to US empire’s wars abroad. In particular, it reads Lloyd Brown’s novel Iron City (1951), about four Black men incarcerated on trumped-up charges, alongside Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper (1950–55) and William Patterson’s We Charge Genocide (1951). Centering on four Black men serving time , the novel demonstrates that one tactic in the war against Black freedom is through the control of time and shows a connection between incarceration and slavery by revealing the disciplinary mechanism of time in service of US empire. Rather than acquiesce to the omnipotence of empire’s time and endless wars, however, Iron City , exemplifying the Black radical thought of the 1950s, imagines a different future, which I term fugitive othertime . Building on Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of a “fugitive elsewhere ,” “an imagined place [that] might afford you a vision of freedom,” I argue for reading Iron City for its dream of a fugitive othertime, as an imagined temporality in which that elsewhere might exist.

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.