Description

This talk offers a relational analysis of distinct yet linked forms of U.S. colonial domination in Asia and the Pacific rather than a focus on one form that tends to elide the other. It demonstrates how the nexus of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism – a conjunction theorized as settler modernity – is largely structured through temporal and spatial exceptions. The temporal exception takes the form of debt imperialism, a process through which the U.S. is able to roll over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conform to the homogenous time of repayment. The spatial exception, a locus in which forms of sovereignty at once proliferate and negate one another, is constituted through sites such as POW camps, refugee camps, military bases and camptowns, and unincorporated as well as incorporated territories. The talk focuses on the Korean War POW camp in particular through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash.

Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and positions: asia critique.