Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

by Jodi Kim

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.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published May 20, 2022

Reviews

[manioł · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5
Really interesting and important context for modern American imperialism. My only critiques would be that I found it repetitive and too abstract at times. That being said, once again, I might come back to this later and decide that I just didn't have enough background to grasp all of it on such a quick read-through. Additionally, I just liked Allegories of the Anthropocene better because it's less historical and more about literary figures and expressions. For my Ecology, Militarization, and Feminism class.