Wesley Attewell
Biographic Data
| ID | 840601 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wesley Attewell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wesley |
| FAMILY NAME | Attewell |
| SIGNATURE | ATTEWELL W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4950-6443 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
East by Southeast: Hong Kong in the Decolonising Pacific
This essay seeks to complicate Hong Kong's seemingly common‐sensical geographical identity as an East Asian—specifically, Chinese—metropolis through a contrapuntal mapping of its historical connections with Southeast Asia. It takes seriously the role that this supposedly hinterland region played in catalysing urban transformations in the colony‐turned‐SAR. Building on work that theorises Hong Kong as a “non‐sovereign” site for the everyday workin…
Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war
This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project ? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-…
War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism
This article explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This article places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imp…
Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World
Scholars Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili engage in a lively discussion that explores the political stakes of infrastructural projects, the organizing logics that infrastructures advance and curtail, and the importance of highlighting the forms of labor, protest, and "making do" that are shaped by and in infrastructure's long shadows. They also discuss the possibilities of world-building that move us away from the logics of spatial containment tha…
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histo…
Sweating for Their Pay: Gender, Labor, and Photography across the Decolonizing Pacific
In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the participation of Asian and Asian diasporic laborers in American Cold War–era projects of war-making throughout Southeast Asia. However, those dimensions of wartime logistics work that were undertaken primarily by Southeast Asian women, including cooking, cleaning, and entertaining, remain understudied. In this essay, we reflect on the gendered forms of reproductive labor that sustained and als…
Just-in-Time Imperialism: The Logistics Revolution and the Vietnam War
In this article, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. Drawing on archival documents collected from the National Archives and Records Administration, I track how the U.S. military and the U.S. Agency for International Development increasingly championed logistics management as a way of solving some of the “frictional” supply problems that threatened to pa…
Between Caregiving and Soldiering: Filipina Non-Citizens and Settler Militarisms in Israel
While Filipinas often appear in studies of gendered reproductive care, Filipinos appear commonly as militarized labor extending American hegemony. Both sets of Filipinx labor aspire to attaining citizenship and rights to permanent settlement. This article focuses on Filipinas in the Israeli Defense Forces. Filipina IDF recruits have recently appeared in Israeli media in order to reframe Israeli settler militarism as benevolent. Yet these instrume…
The Lifelines of Empire: Logistics as Infrastructural Power in Occupied South Vietnam
In this essay, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. I track how the US empire-state used the war as a crucible for forging new hybridizations of military and corporate logistics. Over the course of the war, imperial forces assembled a transpacific infrastructure for managing the just-in-time flows of commodities and bodies between the United States and S…
Between Asia and empire: Infrastructures of encounter in the archive of war
In this essay, we stage a conversation about our experiences researching everyday histories of encounter between Asian and Asian diasporic subjects during the Pacific and Vietnam Wars. Through readings of materials from the archives of two empires, Britain and the United States, with bloody records of military intervention in east and south-east Asia, we show how wartime inter-Asian, Afro-Asian, and Asian diasporic geographies of relation overlap…
Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism
Iyko Day. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x and 256 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-6093-3); $94.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-6079-7).At the turn
From factory to field: Usaid and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan
Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics' historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the Un…
The planet that rules our destiny: Alternative development and environmental power in occupied Afghanistan
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the 'alternative development' effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural 'environment' conducive to the cultivation of legal…
Ghosts in the Delta: Usaid and the historical geographies of Vietnam's 'other' war
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the 'humanitarian present' through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the 'other' war for rural 'hearts and minds' through two distinct, yet …
Every Iraqi's Nightmare”: Blogging Peace in Occupied Baghdad
The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain largely unexplored. This paper provides a series of critical readings of Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and addresses two main issues. First, there is a systematic tension between the ways in which Riverbend is “subalternized” (by her readers and herself) and her attempts to reclaim the ground upon which post‐invasion Iraq is represented. Second, the inva…
From factory to field: Usaid and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan
Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics' historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the Un…
The Lifelines of Empire: Logistics as Infrastructural Power in Occupied South Vietnam
In this essay, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. I track how the US empire-state used the war as a crucible for forging new hybridizations of military and corporate logistics. Over the course of the war, imperial forces assembled a transpacific infrastructure for managing the just-in-time flows of commodities and bodies between the United States and S…
Ghosts in the Delta: Usaid and the historical geographies of Vietnam's 'other' war
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the 'humanitarian present' through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the 'other' war for rural 'hearts and minds' through two distinct, yet …
Just-in-Time Imperialism: The Logistics Revolution and the Vietnam War
In this article, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. Drawing on archival documents collected from the National Archives and Records Administration, I track how the U.S. military and the U.S. Agency for International Development increasingly championed logistics management as a way of solving some of the “frictional” supply problems that threatened to pa…
War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism
This article explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This article places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imp…
The planet that rules our destiny: Alternative development and environmental power in occupied Afghanistan
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the 'alternative development' effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural 'environment' conducive to the cultivation of legal…
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histo…
Sweating for Their Pay: Gender, Labor, and Photography across the Decolonizing Pacific
In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the participation of Asian and Asian diasporic laborers in American Cold War–era projects of war-making throughout Southeast Asia. However, those dimensions of wartime logistics work that were undertaken primarily by Southeast Asian women, including cooking, cleaning, and entertaining, remain understudied. In this essay, we reflect on the gendered forms of reproductive labor that sustained and als…
Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war
This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project ? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-…
Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World
Scholars Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili engage in a lively discussion that explores the political stakes of infrastructural projects, the organizing logics that infrastructures advance and curtail, and the importance of highlighting the forms of labor, protest, and "making do" that are shaped by and in infrastructure's long shadows. They also discuss the possibilities of world-building that move us away from the logics of spatial containment tha…
Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism
Iyko Day. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x and 256 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-6093-3); $94.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-6079-7).At the turn
Every Iraqi's Nightmare”: Blogging Peace in Occupied Baghdad
The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain largely unexplored. This paper provides a series of critical readings of Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and addresses two main issues. First, there is a systematic tension between the ways in which Riverbend is “subalternized” (by her readers and herself) and her attempts to reclaim the ground upon which post‐invasion Iraq is represented. Second, the inva…
Ghosts in the Delta: Usaid and the historical geographies of Vietnam's 'other' war
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the 'humanitarian present' through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the 'other' war for rural 'hearts and minds' through two distinct, yet …
The planet that rules our destiny: Alternative development and environmental power in occupied Afghanistan
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the 'alternative development' effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural 'environment' conducive to the cultivation of legal…
Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism
Iyko Day. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. x and 256 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-6093-3); $94.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-6079-7).At the turn
From factory to field: Usaid and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan
Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics' historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the Un…
Between Asia and empire: Infrastructures of encounter in the archive of war
In this essay, we stage a conversation about our experiences researching everyday histories of encounter between Asian and Asian diasporic subjects during the Pacific and Vietnam Wars. Through readings of materials from the archives of two empires, Britain and the United States, with bloody records of military intervention in east and south-east Asia, we show how wartime inter-Asian, Afro-Asian, and Asian diasporic geographies of relation overlap…
Between Caregiving and Soldiering: Filipina Non-Citizens and Settler Militarisms in Israel
While Filipinas often appear in studies of gendered reproductive care, Filipinos appear commonly as militarized labor extending American hegemony. Both sets of Filipinx labor aspire to attaining citizenship and rights to permanent settlement. This article focuses on Filipinas in the Israeli Defense Forces. Filipina IDF recruits have recently appeared in Israeli media in order to reframe Israeli settler militarism as benevolent. Yet these instrume…
The Lifelines of Empire: Logistics as Infrastructural Power in Occupied South Vietnam
In this essay, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. I track how the US empire-state used the war as a crucible for forging new hybridizations of military and corporate logistics. Over the course of the war, imperial forces assembled a transpacific infrastructure for managing the just-in-time flows of commodities and bodies between the United States and S…
Sweating for Their Pay: Gender, Labor, and Photography across the Decolonizing Pacific
In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the participation of Asian and Asian diasporic laborers in American Cold War–era projects of war-making throughout Southeast Asia. However, those dimensions of wartime logistics work that were undertaken primarily by Southeast Asian women, including cooking, cleaning, and entertaining, remain understudied. In this essay, we reflect on the gendered forms of reproductive labor that sustained and als…
Just-in-Time Imperialism: The Logistics Revolution and the Vietnam War
In this article, I argue that an important yet understudied consequence of the Vietnam War was an imperial turn toward modern logistics management. Drawing on archival documents collected from the National Archives and Records Administration, I track how the U.S. military and the U.S. Agency for International Development increasingly championed logistics management as a way of solving some of the “frictional” supply problems that threatened to pa…
Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World
Scholars Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili engage in a lively discussion that explores the political stakes of infrastructural projects, the organizing logics that infrastructures advance and curtail, and the importance of highlighting the forms of labor, protest, and "making do" that are shaped by and in infrastructure's long shadows. They also discuss the possibilities of world-building that move us away from the logics of spatial containment tha…
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histo…
Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war
This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project ? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-…
War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism
This article explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This article places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imp…
East by Southeast: Hong Kong in the Decolonising Pacific
This essay seeks to complicate Hong Kong's seemingly common‐sensical geographical identity as an East Asian—specifically, Chinese—metropolis through a contrapuntal mapping of its historical connections with Southeast Asia. It takes seriously the role that this supposedly hinterland region played in catalysing urban transformations in the colony‐turned‐SAR. Building on work that theorises Hong Kong as a “non‐sovereign” site for the everyday workin…
Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Vietnam War (6 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Empire (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works)