Settler Garrison

Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

Bibliographic Data

ID11699815
AuthorsSarah R Meiners (Cornell University, corresponding author), Sarah Meiners (Cornell University)
Year2024
Volume43
Issue2
Pages127-129
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Ethnic History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0278-5927 • E-ISSN: 1936-4695
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/19364695.43.2.09
OpenAlexW4390509971
LanguageEN
Citations received14

“Debt” is at once “a form of imperialism” and “a form of freedom, emancipation, or liberation” (p. 19), writes Jodi Kim in Settler Garrison. Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Kim examines this paradox to uncover how the United States frees itself from its own indebtedness while mobilizing the debt it imposes upon places in Asia and the Pacific. Settler Garrison attends to four purposes in so doing. First, Kim charts the post–World War II emergence and function of “US militarist settler imperialism,” or the manifestation of how “US settler colonialism” combines with “military empire.” Second, she examines how the United States creates “settler garrison[s]” to elevate its own jurisdictional and sovereign authority. Third, she connects these processes to an “exceptional temporal logic” of debt. Debt, in Kim's estimation, is an “economic relation” and a “cultural relation and form undergirded by asymmetries of power at multiple scales.” The United States manages debt by imposing a timeline, or “homogenous time of repayment,” under which countries are obligated to pay debts to prevent consequences the United States itself can avoid. Fourth, and finally, Kim relies on cultural productions to locate and understand US “settler imperial failure” and alternatives to the United States’ practices (pp. 2–3).These concerns flow together across four chapters (as well as an introduction and epilogue) that address settler garrisons—“the spatial manifestation of militarist settler imperialism”—in Asia and the Pacific (p. 25). Kim locates settler garrisons in Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, and Guam: the military base/camptown, prisoner-of-war (POW) camp, and unincorporated territory. These are “spatial exceptions . . . where multiple sovereignties at once compete and cancel one another out as the United States aspires to metapolitical authority” (p. 25). Here, Kim's contributions to understandings of the US empire's conduct are especially rich. Building on Mark Rifkin, Kim argues that the United States deploys metapolitical authority “to render itself exempt from, or as an exception to, the very rules it imposes and enforces on others” (p. 18). Moreover, metapolitical authority masks exceptions, “discursively [obfuscating] and [rendering]” them “as precisely their opposite, as unexceptional” (p. 18). Kim returns to metapolitical authority throughout Settler Garrison, revealing both its workings and collective attempts to subvert it. This emerges through her study of documentaries, multimedia stage productions, novels, novellas, poems and poetic projects, and short stories.For example, in Chapter 4 (“The Unincorporated Territory: Constituting Indefinite Deferral and ‘No Page Is Ever Terra Nullius’”), Kim turns to Guam and Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory series (published across multiple volumes between 2008 and 2017) as well as his other writings. Kim carefully reconstructs how the United States harnesses metapolitical authority “to indefinitely defer the possibility of decolonization” for Chamorros while configuring it as an acceptable use of plenary power (pp. 141, 143). Her close reading of Perez then illustrates how debt emerges when, after “freedom or liberation” via the US military, the United States imposes an “indebted subjectivity or gratitude for a figurative debt” (p. 20). The United States’ occupation of Guam and the high rates of Chamorro enlistment are thus understood as a partial repayment for Guam's liberation from the Spanish and Japanese. However, this debt need not be further prolonged, as settler imperial failure may prevail.Kim also offers a rich theoretical and methodological foundation. First, she proposes a “relational analysis of the distinct yet linked” (p. 17). This move brings Asian and Pacific spaces together with Asian, Asian diasporic, Indigenous, and Indigenous Asian perspectives to “think broadly and relationally about obscured connections without losing sight of local specificities, hierarchies, and incommensurabilities” (p. 17). Kim is also careful to deliberately decenter the “continent” while attending to “the terraqueous and the oceanic alongside island, archipelagic, and peninsular spatialities” (p. 16). This complements recent scholarship like Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi's Archipelago of Resettlement (University of California Press, 2022). Finally, Kim's concerns draw her to the figuration “transpacific,” which she embraces, though critically, as “a differentiated and vexed geocolonial site, method of decolonial critique, and a multivalent keyword” (p. 32). Kim's contributions are striking and raise further questions about how they can be employed alongside concepts such as Yến Lê Espiritu's “critical juxtaposing” (see Body Counts, University of California Press, 2014) in studies of war, empire, migration, and settler colonialism.Kim writes that “transpacific imaginaries . . . ask what it would mean to refuse” the “foreclosure of multiple possible futurities” (p. 61). That Settler Garrison is a study of many things (e.g., capitalism, decolonization, militarism, settler colonialism, and sexual violence) should draw scholars from an extensive range of disciplines to examine this question alongside her and consider it in their own work

Colonialism · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Emancipation · Empire · Militarism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Finance · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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