Settler Garrison

In Settler Garrison Jodi Kim theorizes how the United States extends its sovereignty across Asia and the Pacific in the post-World War II era through a militarist settler imperialism that is leveraged on debt as a manifold economic and cultural relation undergirded by asymmetries of power. Kim demonstrates that despite being the largest debtor nation in the world, the United States positions itself as an imperial creditor that imposes financial and affective indebtedness alongside a disciplinary payback temporality even as it evades repayment of its own debts. This debt imperialism is violently reproduced in juridically ambiguous spaces Kim calls the “settler garrison”: a colonial archipelago of distinct yet linked military camptowns, bases, POW camps, and unincorporated territories situated across the Pacific from South Korea to Okinawa to Guam. Kim reveals this process through an analysis of how a wide array of transpacific cultural productions creates antimilitarist and decolonial imaginaries that diagnose US militarist settler imperialism while envisioning alternatives to it.

References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.

Established in 1669 as a small farming village on the banks of the Merrimack River, Dracuts early settlers made their mark during the American Revolution. From French nobleman Louis Ansart, who became an American citizen and settled in the area, to Dracuts own Joseph Bradley Varnum, the town played a pivotal role in the founding of the nation. More recently, Dracut continues to be the home of modern-day patriots such as Michael Monahan, who left college to serve in the Vietnam War, and Capt. John Ogonowski, who gave his life on September 11, 2001. Dracut has been home to numerous other local legendsDr. Christos Daoulas was the longest-serving Massachusetts school superintendent, and Dennis Piendak oversaw incredible growth and expansion during his 28 years as town manager. Dracut was also home to the indomitable Polly Urquhart, whose name now graces the corner where her store once stood; Rev. Larry Zimmerman, the pastor of the Old Yellow Meeting House for 33 years; and Edmund Murphy, the dean of Massachusetts high school football coaches. These are a few of the many amazing people who came from a town that was once known as simply the wildernesse north of the Merrimac.

Existing studies of settler colonial genocides explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states, and their military forces in the perpetration of exterminatory violence in settler colonial situations, yet rarely pay specific attention to the dynamics around civilian-driven mass violence against indigenous peoples. In many cases, however, civilians were major, if not the main, perpetrators of such violence. The focus of this book is thus on the role of civilians as perpetrators of exterminatory violence and on those elements within settler colonial situations that promoted mass violence on their part.

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.

In Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.

Sett Foster paid his dues...now it's time for his enemies to pay theirs. After a troubled past, Sett Foster wants life to be easier. With his Indian wife, Ria, and money coming in, things could finally be going his way. Then he finds a stray Indian pony carrying a child-but the answer to their dream of having a family comes with a price and Sett is ready to pay with his own blood.