Book Talk and Conversation with Manu Karuka: Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

Description

Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (UC Press, 2019)

The book presentation will be followed by a conversation between Manu Karuka and U of T graduate students.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296640/empires-tracks

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016, edited by Patrick Wolfe), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014, edited by Alyosha Goldstein). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Student participants:

Thomas Blampied, History Department, U of T
Megan Femi-Cole, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T
Yehji Jeong, History Department, U of T
Rui Liu, Women and Gender Studies Institute, U of T
Melanie Ng, History Department, U of T
Fernanda Yanchapaxi Travez, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, U of T