New Destinations of Empire
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New Destinations of Empire

Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States

Title Details

Pages: 262

Illustrations: 14 b&w

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 11/01/2024

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6691-3

List Price: $29.95

Web PDF

Pub Date: 11/01/2024

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6693-7

List Price: $29.95

EPUB

Pub Date: 11/01/2024

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6692-0

List Price: $29.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 11/01/2024

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6634-0

List Price: $119.95

New Destinations of Empire

Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States

How U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects

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In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas.

An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire.

In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Emily Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

Mitchell-Eaton sheds new light on the critically important issues of migration, citizenship, and bordering by bringing forward and interrogating the notion of imperial citizenship—what it is, how it impacts people, how state actors enact it, and how people experience it. This new perspective in New Destinations of Empire makes important contributions not only to the robust scholarly conversation within the fields of geography, sociology, and migration studies but also to the public and political conversations and policy-making in regard to migration that are so vexing in the world today.

—Mona Domosh, author of Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South

A deeply researched, well-written, and solidly structured book, New Destinations of Empire offers a multi-scalar geographic analysis of the ways in which empire produces the very places to which people migrate.

—Perla M. Guerrero, author of Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place

About the Author/Editor

Emily Mitchell-Eaton is assistant professor in geography at Colgate University. Her previous writing has been published in numerous scholarly journals.