Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

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.

Author: Jodi Kim
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 05/20/2022
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.56d
ISBN13: 9781478018315
ISBN10: 1478018313
BISAC Categories:
- History | World | General
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Asian American Studies & Pacific
- Political Science | Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

About the Author
Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside; coeditor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, also published by Duke University Press; and author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War.