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
Related Subjects
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography
Regional / International studies
Population and migration geography
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration
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.
—Mona Domosh, author of Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
—Perla M. Guerrero, author of Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place