In Spring 2023, Center for Asian Studies hosted Dr. Jodi Kim (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California Riverside) for a talk on her new book Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Duke University Press 2022). The talk was part of Center鈥檚 annual theme 鈥淎sia, Empire, Social Justice: Home and Abroad.鈥� The talk was co-sponsored by the Departments of聽Asian Languages and Civilizations,聽English, Ethnic Studies and Media Studies.
Dr. Kim鈥檚 research and teaching interests are at the intersections of Asian American studies, critical ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory, feminist epistemologies, and critiques of US empire and militarism. 聽Her first book,聽Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War聽(University of Minnesota Press, 2010), offers a critique of American empire in Asia through an interdisciplinary analysis of Asian American cultural productions and their critical intersections with Cold War geopolitics and logics. Her second book,聽Settler Garrison:聽Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries聽(Duke University Press, 2022)聽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.聽Kim聽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.聽Kim聽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.
The talk was attended by 40-50 people and generated a productive Q&A. Prior to the talk, Dr. Kim spoke with the graduate students in Dr. Nishant Upadhyay鈥檚 (Ethnic Studies) grad seminar on the U.S. Empire.