US Militarism Research Articles

“A Living Artist with Open Eyes”: the Transnational Journey of Mitsu Yashima

Mitsu Yashima (1908–1988) was a political dissident and artist in two countries. In prewar Japan, she became a proletarian rights activist; during World War ii she continued to oppose Japanese militarism by working for the United States government. In her later years, she opposed US militarism during the Vietnam War. In San Francisco, she became an admired cultural worker in the Asian American movement. Examining her life offers rare glimpses of a woman’s efforts to forge a career in the male-dominated art worlds of twentieth-century Japan and the US. Her transnational life expands the boundaries of Japanese American history, which has long focused on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigration to the US West and Hawaiʻi. Her activism also challenges the perception that only third-generation Japanese Americans joined the Asian American movement of the 1960s-1970s. Yashima’s concern for human rights and peace fueled her art, political engagement, and community building.

Kisses at the memorial: affective objects, US militarism and feminist resistance at sites of wartime memory

ABSTRACT In 2005, American artist Seward Johnson first exhibited The Unconditional Surrender, a sculpture modelled after Life Magazine’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a white-clad woman on 14 August 1945, day of the Allied victory against Japan that ended World War II. This article interrogates the presence of Johnson’s sculpture, now an iconic object, at prominent sites of tourism and commemoration in San Diego, California, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Caen, Northern France, amongst other places in the United States and Europe. It asks, how do affective encounters between the sculpture, memorial visitors, and feminist activists shape understandings of US militarism? Controversies around the sculpture illuminate the importance of affective encounters with iconic objects for sustaining militarism, as well as for contesting it. On the one hand, visitors’ often playful interactions with the sculpture reproduce benevolent accounts of US militarism. On the other hand, the addition of a plaque reminding visitors of the sexual violence perpetrated by American servicemen abroad shows that objects matter in the contestation of the violent dimension of any militarism. I suggest that while verbal interventions shape the meaning of iconic objects, the latter’s aesthetic qualities, and those of their material environment, allow it to ‘speak’ for or against militarism. These findings draw on participant observation at the memorial sites and an analysis of statements by the artist, curators, feminist critics, and visitors.

Critical Theology Against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, edited by Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh

Critical Theology Against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, edited by Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh

Transpacific Camptowns: Korean Women, US Army Bases, and Military Prostitution in America

Abstract Military prostitution has been a staple of US–Korea relations since the 1940s, contained in the so-called camptown communities surrounding US military bases in South Korea. But during the 1970s, as the US military steadily reduced its troop presence in Asia, camptowns were thrown into a chaotic state. Facing tremendous social disorder and economic upheaval, establishments that depended upon GI patronage began sending their madams and sex workers to domestic military sites through brokered marriages with US servicemen. These women arrived in the US South, a region housing the vast majority of America’s military. Consequently, southern bases like Fort Bragg in Fayetteville (NC), Fort Campbell in Clarksville (TN), and Fort Hood in Killeen (TX) saw the proliferation of military prostitution, which took form in illicit massage businesses catering to the sexual needs of local troop populations. By the 1980s, the Korean American sex trade would spread from these southern military towns to elsewhere in the United States. Highlighting the transpacific circuits among camptowns in South Korea and military bases in the United States since 1945, this article develops a portrait of the US South as a transnational militarized terrain, the camptown as a transpacific phenomenon, and Korean immigrant community formation as deeply intertwined with the happenings of US militarism abroad. In doing so, it explains how the proliferation of illicit massage businesses witnessed by southern military communities in the 1970s was a transnational outgrowth of military prostitution encouraged by the US military in South Korea.

US Military Nationalism and the Intimate Public Sphere: The Role of the Dog in US Militarism

ABSTRACTIn the context of the US ‘war on terror’, racialisation intensifies a porous boundary between the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Dogs deployed within this war are folded symbolically and materially into a species-infused racialised nationalism, instrumentalised as tools of intimidation, equipment to be cared for, pets to be loved, and heroes to be honoured. Ubiquitous discourses about these dogs as ‘sacrificing heroes’ valorise the dogs’ lives and present them as ‘quasi-liberal subjects’, contributing to frameworks that link love for dogs with US military nationalism. These discourses echo in celebrations of the combat roles of these dogs, in mourning practices honouring them, and in acts of consumer citizenship. They reproduce an affective investment in US nationalism while effacing the cruelty of the US militarism, producing a sentimental narrative of war. They reveal how a toxic blend of animalisation and racialisation creates differential frames of precarity and grievability in the sentimentalised biopolitics that underpin the mutually constitutive formations of US nationalism and militarism. The article demonstrates the role of the figure of the dog in constructing an intimate public sphere saturated with affective frames of nationalism in the US ‘war on terror’.

Montage/mediation/publicity: Far from Vietnam

Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, et al., 1967), though heralded as a major contribution to the history of radical documentary and extolled as a cri de coeur about the inability of French intellectuals to sufficiently contribute to the anti-war struggle, has been inadequately understood for the internationalism underlining its politics and the montage employed to achieve it. Its production linked France, the USA, Cuba and Vietnam; its textual shape consolidated its transnational exchanges through montage, which marshalled multiple counter-cinematic techniques to link the real and imaginary addressees of global anti-war publics across cuts generative of new creative cartographies and political subjectivities. Far from Vietnam’s form signalled the counter-cinema that it was while simultaneously calling into the being the counter-public necessary to confront US militarism. As opposed to uncritical evocations of solidarity, which elide differences between home and abroad, the essay concludes by arguing that Far from Vietnam, much as its title suggests, realizes and questions international political praxis’s stability as a category of thought and action.

Archipelagic rhetoric: remapping the Marianas and challenging militarization from “A Stirring Place”

ABSTRACTEngaging critical rhetorical fieldwork in the Mariana Islands archipelago, this article destabilizes colonial naming projects and US federal control that dispossess island places from Indigenous peoples. On Euro-American and military maps, archipelagoes are depicted as distant, tiny, empty, or merely (is)lands for US geostrategic control. I argue for a remapping of the Marianas as expansive, oceanic sites of resistance to colonial cartographic violence and US militarization. Fieldwork in the Marianas demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies function as archipelagic rhetoric enacted through a Chamoru sense of place. I examine these fluid relational connections to place and their implications for decolonization.

Derechos en crisis: Central American asylum claims in the age of authoritarian neoliberalism

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the insights of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Gramsci coupled with ethnographic research conducted in Texas, this paper discusses how the Obama Administration sought to impose a state of exception on Central American refugees by attempting to suspend substantive refugee protections enshrined in international law, in the name of responding to a refugee crisis. The paper also illustrates how these efforts to create a state of exception have been challenged and contested by subaltern actors, in this case, a group of women and children hunger strikers and their activist allies in Texas. The article makes the case that these hunger strikers are part of an emergent Mesoamerican refugee movement that has formed within the interstices of the homeland security state. This speaks not to a “refugee crisis,” as many have posited, but rather to the crisis of rights regimes of liberal democratic states writ large in the wake of massive displacements of people from Central America, a region racked by almost 40 years of neoliberal policies, US militarism, and failed zero-tolerance security paradigms.

See Something, Say Something: Security Rituals, Affect, and US Nationalism from the Cold War to the War on Terror

This article examines “security rituals,” routinized and repetitive performances of security practices, and their role in reproducing US nationalism and militarism. It argues that the security ritual as a form emerges out of the Cold War. Its revival in the war on terror era, which has seen a massive expansion of the national security state, marks a continuity of Cold War emotion management and national security affect. Employing Michael Billig’s concepts of “hot” and “banal” nationalism, the article contends that the nationwide “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign forms the core of banal security nationalism, characterized by its ubiquitous and taken-for-granted presence in daily life. This form of nationalism is punctuated by moments of hot nationalism that erupt in the wake of attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the United States and other Western countries. Together, banal and hot nationalism form part of a complex that serves to normalize the global war on terror. Further, in the twenty-first century, racialized notions of national belonging coexist with the “clash of civilizations” logic, bringing together nationalism with globalism.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Everybody was boodle fighting: military histories, culinary tourism, and diasporic dining

This article examines how Toronto’s Filipina/o food establishments have engaged with military practices of eating together across rank through the boodle fight, in which diners eat with their hands, sharing heaps of rice and viands on a central table covered in banana leaves. It asks: what negotiations do urban ethnic restauranteurs make with the Philippines’ history of US imperialism and militarism when they advertise and host boodle fights in their establishments? This study excavates the boodle fight from its West Point origin to its appearances in Philippine militarized civic education and its entry into transpacific diplomatic gatherings and urban diasporic culinary tourism initiatives in North America and the Middle East. It further anchors itself by means of oral histories with restaurateurs and diners—around a boodle fight meal—and explores the entangled narratives of militarism across generations in the Philippine diaspora. While the boodle fight is advertised as a break-down of ranks in favor of a collective Philippine culinary nationalism, it is argued that it never rids itself of military histories and social inequalities reinforced by militarized culture.

“Just being real”: A post-colonial critique on Amerasian engagement in Central Luzon’s sex industry

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the historical and social cultural factors that shape Filipino Amerasian women’s participation in sex work in the Olongapo red light district, adjacent to the former US Subic Bay Naval Base. The analysis shares terrain covered by other studies that examine the link between US militarism and Asian sex industries. In addition, this paper considers how racialized and sexualized power structures situate Amerasian women in specific ways in relation to sex work in the Philippines. A feminist post-colonial approach, including discourses on race, miscegenation and nationalism, provides a fresh perspective on how colonial and post-colonial structures and systems of power have shaped the sex industry as it is today, contributing to what may be an overrepresentation of Filipina Amerasians in sex work.

Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris

Reviewed by: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris Holly M Barker Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War, by Martha Smith-Norris. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. isbn 978-0-8248-4762-3, x + 159 pages, extensive endnotes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $62.00. Anthropologists, journalists, and filmmakers examining the impacts of US militarism in the Marshall Islands are numerous and sometimes trip over one another during research. It is refreshing to have a trained historian provide perspectives from a different discipline, as each field of study brings its own methods and foci. Martha Smith-Norris's book supplements our collective knowledge about US Cold War activities in the Marshall Islands in many important ways. The sixty-five pages of endnotes and bibliography, as well as many photos in the text, include resources not discussed in other examinations of this topic and bring into clarity large-scale patterns of US behavior. Rather than treat US nuclear weapons testing and US missile testing in the Marshall Islands as two separate activities, the author shows how the missile testing is an evolution of US actions and motivations at its Pacific proving grounds that began with nuclear weapons tests in 1946 and continue with contemporary US activities on Kwajalein Atoll. Of critical importance to this history, Smith-Norris's archival sleuthing amplifies the contributions of Marshallese activists by documenting resistance to US military tests, including the sail-ins and sit-ins led by the landowners of Kwajalein. The archival research focuses on the ways that these protests embarrassed the United States or halted missile tests and on the fact that these resistance groups sometimes comprised mostly women. The impact of Marshallese protests on the military and political leadership in the United States becomes evident in source material Smith-Norris presents, such as the response of the US commander of the missile base in Kwajalein to the 1982 sit-in: "We should not underestimate the determination of the landowners … or their capacity to undertake further occupation measures calling for physical discomfort or even violent confrontation" (121). Through her archival research, Smith-Norris also amplifies the colonial arrogance of US Government practices, such as the takings of land without obtaining Marshallese consent, including the decision to use Bikini Atoll in 1946 for nuclear weapons tests: "For a sum of $10, the government of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands granted the United States the 'exclusive right to use and occupy' all of the Bikini Atoll 'for an [End Page 382] indefinite period of time.' This document was signed by two American representatives … [but] significantly, no members of the Bikini Council were asked to sign the agreement" (45–46). Another pattern that surfaces from the archival evidence is the US Government's repeated resettlement of Marshallese on atolls or islands that were not previously occupied and that were unfit for full-time human habitation such as Rongerik, Ujelang, Ejit, Kili, and Mejatto. Smith-Norris's meticulous archival research also substantiates previously documented patterns of human experimentation involving Marshallese exposed to radioactive fallout, resettled on contaminated lands, or used as control populations in biomedical research; none of these activities were for the "benefit" of the Marshallese. After reviewing documents pertaining to biomedical experimentation on Rongelap, the inhabited atoll closest to the ground-zero location of Bikini Atoll, the author concludes: "Clearly, the [Atomic Energy Commission's] research interests prevailed over concerns for the health of the Rongelapese" (89). While the standard format for most book reviews is to discuss both the strengths and critiques of a publication, this review draws inspiration from Shawn Wilson's call (in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods [2008]) to build relationships, in this case between disciplines and researchers. As Wilson pointed out: "Criticizing or judging would imply that I know more about someone else's work and the relationships that went into it than they do themselves. I have no doubt that as others did their research, they used the methods and paradigms that seemed most suited to the job as they saw it" (2008, 43). With Wilson's...

Guam: Protests at the Tip of America's Spear

In 2009, the US Department of Defense outlined their plans to dramatically increase their military presence in Guam, a Micronesian island that has been a colony of the United States since 1898. This move of several thousand Marines currently stationed in Okinawa represented the most recent instance whereby the United States intends to “sharpen” what its military planners have referred to as “the tip of their spear” leveled against potential threats in Asia. The increased military presence as well as proposed firing and training ranges would have significantly impacted the environment and culture of the island, and as such have become objects of local community debate and protest. Michael Lujan Bevacqua's article chronicles recent activism against US militarization in Guam and provides a context as to why this 212-square-mile colony in the Western Pacific holds so much strategic value to the United States.

Settler Modernity’s Spatial Exceptions: The US POW Camp, Metapolitical Authority, and Ha Jin’s War Trash

This essay provides a critical genealogy of the United States’ militarized relation with China through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash . This vexed relation takes form in the novel as a self-described “documentary style” memoir of a Chinese POW who survives the brutality of a UN–US camp during the Korean War. War Trash gestures to the significance of China in the consolidation of the United States as an increasingly militarized national security and permanent warfare state from World War II and into the twenty-first century. Focusing on how the novel renders the POW camp as a particular kind of spatial exception, in which the biopolitical space and the geopolitical territory coconstitute each other, the essay demonstrates how the nexus of US militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism—an ensemble theorized as settler modernity—in Asia and the Pacific is largely structured and reproduced through such exceptions. War Trash’s rendering of the Korean War POW camp thus generates broader questions about US settler modernity’s attempt to seize metapolitical authority through spatial exceptions extending beyond what became the fifty states (or incorporated territories) constituting the United States in an era when the settler state also becomes a military empire.

“Life Given Straight from the Heart”: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai‘i during World War II

This essay analyzes the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i by examining the expansion of public health programs under martial law during World War II. I explore the biopolitics of wartime public health programs that targeted health and hygiene practices as a means of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population control. The mandatory immunization program vaccinated individuals in order to maintain an uncontaminated military base in Hawai‘i and produce able “Americanized” bodies that could contribute to the US military project. The Honolulu Blood Bank collected donations from these bodies as supplements to military strength and promoted blood donation through racialized tropes of patriotism and loyalty. I explore how the US military government employed a provisional wartime “racial liberalism” in Hawai‘i in order to incorporate all peoples in these programs regardless of race, yet these projects simultaneously intensified the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups and erased Hawaiian indigeneity. As Hawai‘i became a biopolitical center of the Pacific War, the coercive conditions of martial law and wartime racial discourse compelled all peoples in Hawai‘i to cultivate biological health, only to then surrender it for the extraction of biomedical resources—all in the name of military security.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Mari Yoshihara This issue of American Quarterly goes into production in the wake of the 2016 election, and by the time this issue goes to print, Donald Trump will be serving as president of the United States. Even as American studies scholars have long dedicated ourselves to understanding white supremacy, patriarchy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism, the election results have been a tremendous shock. The values, policies, and behavior represented by Trump, his supporters, and those he is choosing as his staff are deeply in opposition to the fundamental principles of the ASA community. The election results challenge us to seriously reflect on what it means to do American studies and renew our commitments as scholars, teachers, and activists in this world. What the United States and the world are about to face under the Trump administration—many aspects of which will try to undermine the gains of decades of social activism, others of which will reinforce the injustices and inequalities structured into American society long before this election—all the more underscores the critical importance of rigorous intersectional analysis of American history and society and engaged pedagogy and activism. It is, then, perhaps fitting that we open this issue with an essay on the question of entrance to the White House. Kate Masur examines African Americans’ demands for recognition at White House social functions and whites’ varied reactions during the Lincoln administration. Other essays in this issue also address race, biopower, and regulation of body and space in different political contexts. Juliet Nebolon focuses on public health programs in World War II Hawai‘i to analyze the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization, illustrating how wartime racial liberalism compelled all people in Hawai‘i to cultivate health, which then led to the extraction of biomedical resources in the name of military security. John Bloom looks at mandatory bicycle regulation and bicycle stakeouts in Washington, DC, in 1963–2009 as a mechanism for policing of racial boundaries in public spaces, which fore-shadowed the racialized law and order policies practiced across the nation. Joseph Darda and Theresa Geller both analyze the cultural narratives about the state and war in film and television. Darda chronicles how the George H. W. Bush administration revised the cultural narrative of the Vietnam War by militarizing the humanitarian ethic of the antiwar movement in the Persian Gulf and how the militarization of humanitarian affect contained liberal anti-war [End Page v] discourse. Geller’s study of The X-Files uses Fredric Jameson’s methods to illustrate the show’s allegorization of the dialectical relationship between the governmental conspiracy and the effects of its unchecked power on marginalized communities. This issue carries four book reviews on new scholarship in diverse topics. In her review of three books that reassess the analytic of intersectionality, Jennifer C. Nash problematizes the impulse toward a “correct” reading and historicization of intersectionality and calls for a sustained interrogation of the ways in which “black woman” haunts the unconscious of the fields. This review provides a useful context for Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s discussion of three works on black sexuality, erotic labor, and pornography. Patrick Wilz reviews four books on discourses of opposition in the twentieth century. John Worsencroft’s review examines four works on militarized state, community, and citizenship. In an event review, Kristin Moriah discusses the paradox of the seeming ascendance of ethnic diversity on the popular stage in her review of the 2016 Broadway musical Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2017 The American Studies Association

African Americans, the Racial State, and the Cultus of War

This essay examines Black support for US militarism from the 1890s to the First World War amid devastating forms of institutional racism. As the first African American soldiers were deployed to France to liberate Europe’s White citizens, the US government hanged thirteen Black soldiers because they sought to defend themselves from mob violence at the hands of White soldiers and civilians. Despite this, the nation’s strident racism did not prevent Blacks from seeking entry into the armed forces. This article explains why African Americans willingly risked their lives to support the military imperatives of the very White government that subjected them to the assaults of racism through legal sanction. Central to this problem was the ritual power of civil religion, particularly the role of death in warfare. By risking their lives through military service, African American soldiers sacrificed themselves, thereby participating in a cultic form of nationalism that transformed them into heroes and that promised to forge their inclusion in the nation’s political body. Black military service in this way transcended the mundane level of conundrum and stoked powerful expressions of loyalty to a racial state that reinscribed the racist order of White supremacism.

Ethnography at its edges: Compulsory Zionism, free speech, and anthropology

ABSTRACTLara Deeb and Jessica Winegar argue convincingly in Anthropology's Politics that US‐based academics face harassment and threats to their careers if they publicly reject US militarism in the Middle East and criticize the Israeli state in their teaching, research, and public speaking. Their analysis of five generations of anthropologists demonstrates that knowledge production is always political, but the thematic chapter organization—graduate school, getting hired, and handling job conflicts—does not explore the historical conjunctures in which the cohorts were formed. The authors’ assertion that the American Anthropological Association's practice of issuing public statements ignores the Middle East and criticism of US policies is clear, yet the association's history of opposition to US policies globally is uneven and episodic. Anthropology's Politics is an important and well‐researched book.

Tactical Tactility: Warfare, Gender, and Cultural Intelligence

The participation of women in the landscape of warfare is increasingly visible; nowhere is this more evident than in the US military’s global endeavors. The US military’s reliance on cultural intelligence in its conceptualization of engagement strategies has resulted in the articulation of specific gendered roles in warfare. Women are thought to be particularly well suited to non-violent tactile engagements with civilians in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan because of gender segregation in public and private spaces. Women in the military have consequently been able to argue for recognition of their combat service by framing this work in the war zone as work only women can do. Women reporters have been able to develop profiles as media producers, commentators, and experts on foreign policy, women, and the military by producing intimate stories about the lives of civilians only they can access. The work soldiers and reporters do is located in the warzone, but in the realms of the domestic and social, in the periods between bursts of violent engagement. These women are deployed as mediators between civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying forces for different but related purposes. Soldiers do the auxiliary work of combat in these encounters, reporters produce knowledge that undergirds the military project. Their work in combat zones emphasizes the interpersonal and relational as forms of tactile engagement. In these roles, they are also often mediating between the “temporary” infrastructure of the war zone and occupation, and the “permanent” infrastructure of nation state, local government, and community. The work women do as soldiers and reporters operates effectively with the narrative of militarism as a means for liberating women, reinforcing the perception of the military as an institution that is increasingly progressive in its attitudes towards membership, and in its military strategies. When US military strategy focuses on cultural practice in Arab and Muslim societies, commanders operationalize women soldiers in the tactics of militarism, the liberation of Muslim women becomes central in news and governmental discourses alike, and the notion of “feminism” is drawn into the project of US militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq in complex ways that elucidate how gender, equality, and difference, can be deployed in service of warfare.