asian american studies

Fordham University

Chapter Title: Transpacific Entanglements Chapter Author(s): Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama

Book Title: Flashpoints for Asian American Studies Book Editor(s): Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Published by: Fordham University. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xhr6h7.13

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P a r t I I I

Remapping Asia, Recalibrating Asian Amer i ca

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In our collaborative contribution, we examine the geopo liti cal, military, and epistemological entanglements between U.S. wars in Asia, U.S. racial capitalism, and U.S. empire and argue that U.S. empire and militarism in Asia and the Pacific Islands have been critical, yet underrecognized, parts of the genealogy of the con temporary condition of U.S. neoliberalism. We emphasize that U.S. neoliberalism mediates itself through the U.S. national security state, which is si mul ta neously a racial state and a settler state; this is expressed not merely in the racialization of Asian and Pacific Islander peoples but significantly in the erasure of historical and ongoing settler colonialism and, furthermore, in a racial social order that si mul ta neously pronounces antiblackness and Islamophobia. In our elaboration of “trans- pacific entanglements,” historical and ongoing settler logics of invasion, re- moval, and seizure continuously articulate with other forms of appropriation and subjugation: This U.S. settler logic intersects with racialized capitalism and overseas empire asserts itself— often through the collaborative networks of the U.S.- backed, patriarchally or ga nized, subimperial Asian “client- states”—in transpacific arrangements such as: export pro cessing zones in the Philippines, U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam, nuclear test sites

C h a p t e r   1 0

Transpacific Entanglements

Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

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176 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

in the Marshall Islands, the exportation of nuclear power plants through- out Asia, the partition of Korea, and the joint military operations that demonstrate and secure the empire’s reach. In this way, we conceptualize U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands as at once a settler- colonial formation, a racial and sexualized cap i tal ist formation, and a military proj- ect that permits overseas dominance, appropriation, and exploitation. Em- pire works si mul ta neously, yet differentially, to naturalize U.S. presence and possession in Asia and the Pacific Islands through the imperatives of national security and war time necessity, to racialize the peoples it captures, occupies, kills, and governs, and to disavow the historical and ongoing dispossessions of Indigenous peoples.

In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe situated racialized Asian immigrant labor within the history of U.S. capitalism, expanding its global reach through wars in Asia; she noted that U.S. im- migration exclusion acts and naturalization laws managed and produced Asian American racial formation through both exclusion and inclusion in relation to the history of U.S. wars in Asia. As Yên Lê Espiritu has argued in her recent book Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es), and Lisa Yoneyama makes evident in Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japa nese War Crimes, American exceptionalism has rationalized U.S. military and cap i tal ist interventions in Asia and the Pa- cific Islands as necessary for the “national security” of the United States and for the humanitarian “rescue” of Asian peoples. The global portrait of the United States as triumphant and humanitarian liberator of Asia, and to a similar extent the Pacific Islands, has buttressed the military buildup against a broad range of Amer i ca’s “enemies,” variously named in twentieth- century history as “fascists” during the Second World War, “underdevel- opment” in the U.S.- modeled modernization proj ects of postcolonial third world countries, “communists” in the Cold War, and “terrorists” in the War on Terror. These links indicate that U.S. militarism and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands displaces and racializes Asian and Pacific mi- grants and refugees and that the discourse of the United States as libera- tor of Asia is employed in turn to explain the necessary expansion of militarism in the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, Korea, and Viet- nam and to justify the current wars in Iraq, Af ghan i stan, Syria, and else- where. In that pro cess, moreover, the settler logic of U.S. imperial nation and its “military- security- academic” regime si mul ta neously discipline and regulate the class, race, sexual, and other uneven social relations and iden- tities within and along the national border of the U.S. mainland. It is im- perative, therefore, that any attempts at transforming the American pres ent

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Transpacific Entanglements 177

must take into account the geohistorical ramifications of U.S. settler colo- nialism and its ties to specific transpacific conditions in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

At this moment of reinvigorated U.S. imperialism and globalized mili- tarization, we suggest it is impor tant to interrogate anew the public recol- lections of the U.S. war in Vietnam. By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive wars between Western im- perial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer i ca. U.S. mil- itary policies cost Vietnam at least three million lives, the maiming of countless bodies, the poisoning of its water, land, and air, the razing of its countryside, and the devastation of most of its infrastructure. Indeed, more explosives were dropped on Vietnam, a country two- thirds the size of California, than in all of World War II. Yet post-1975 public discussions of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating his- tory. This “skipping over” of the Vietnam War constitutes an or ga nized and strategic forgetting of a controversial and unsuccessful war, enabling Americans to continue to push military intervention as key in Amer i ca’s self- appointed role as liberators— protectors of democracy, liberty, and equality, both at home and abroad.

As a controversial and unsuccessful war, the Vietnam War has the po- tential to unsettle the master narratives of “rescue and liberation” and re- focus attention on the troubling rec ord of U.S. military aggression. And yet, as demonstrated by the recent wars in West and South Asia, the U.S. loss in Vietnam has not curbed the United States’ crusade to remake the world by military force. Instead, the United States appears to have been able to fold the Vietnam War into its list of “good wars.” The narrative of the “good refugee,” deployed by the larger U.S. society and by Viet nam- ese Americans themselves, has been crucial in enabling the United States to turn the Vietnam War into a good war. Other wise absent in U.S. pub- lic discussions of Vietnam, Viet nam ese refugees become most vis i ble and intelligible to Americans as successful, assimilated, and anticommunist newcomers to the American “melting pot.” Represented as the grateful beneficiary of U.S.- style freedom, Viet nam ese in the United States be- come the featured evidence of the appropriateness of the U.S. war in Vietnam: that the war, no matter the cost, was ultimately necessary, just, and successful. Having been deployed to “rescue” the Vietnam War for Americans, Viet nam ese refugees thus constitute a solution rather than a prob lem for the United States, as often argued.

The good war narrative requires the production not only of the good refugee but also of the United States as the good refuge. The making of

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178 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

the “good refuge” was launched in April 1975 as U.S. media and officials extolled and sensationalized the U.S. airlifting of approximately 130,000 Viet nam ese out of the city in the final days before the Fall of Saigon and subsequently encamping the refugees at military bases throughout the Pacific archipelago. With the Defense Department coordinating transpor- tation and the Joint Chiefs of Staff- Pacific Command in charge of the military moves necessary for the evacuation, Viet nam ese were airlifted from Saigon on U.S. military aircrafts, transferred to U.S. military bases on (neo)colonized spaces such as the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Hawaii, and delivered to yet another set of military bases throughout the United States: Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, or Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. While these efforts have been widely covered by the media and scholars alike as “rescuing missions,” we need to expose them instead as colonial and militarized ventures.

Moving from one U.S. military base to another, Viet nam ese refugees witnessed firsthand the reach of the U.S. empire in the Asia- Pacific region. Far from confirming U.S. benevolence, the U.S. evacuation of Viet nam ese refugees made vis i ble the legacy of U.S. colonial and military expansion into the Asia Pacific region. The fact that the majority of the first- wave refugees were routed through the Philippines and Guam revealed the lay- ering of U.S. past colonial and ongoing militarization practices on these islands. It was the region’s (neo)colonial dependence on the United States that turned the Philippines and Guam, U.S. former and current colonial territories respectively, into the “ideal” receiving centers of the U.S. res- cuing proj ect; and it was the enormity of the U.S. military buildup in the Pacific that uniquely equipped U.S. bases there to handle the large- scale refugee rescue operation. As such, U.S. evacuation efforts were not a slap- dash response to an emergency situation that arose in Vietnam in 1975 but rather part and parcel of the long- standing militarized histories and cir- cuits that connected Vietnam, the Philippines, and Guam, dating back to 1898.

The U.S. initial designation of Clark Air Force Base as a refugee stag- ing point was intimately linked to, and a direct outcome of, U.S. colonial subordination and militarization of the Philippines. Soon after, when President Ferdinand Marcos refused to accept any more Viet nam ese refu- gees, U.S. officials moved the premier refugee staging area from the Phil- ippines to Guam. As an unincorporated or ga nized territory of the United States under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior, Guam— specifically, its U.S. air and naval bases, which took up one- third of the

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Transpacific Entanglements 179

island— became the “logical” transit camps for the pro cessing of evacuees. With total land area of about two hundred square miles, and meager local resources, Guam was hardly an ideal location for the large- scale refugee operation. That it became the major refugee staging point in the Pacific had more to do with the U.S. militarization of Guam than with U.S. hu- manitarianism. The U.S. decision to designate Guam the primary staging ground for refugees, even when the island’s resources were severely stretched and its inhabitants adversely affected, repeats the long- standing belief that indigenous land is essentially “empty land”— that is, land empty of its Indigenous population. The refugee situation on Guam thus bespeaks the intertwined histories of U.S. settler colonialism and U.S. military co- lonialism on Guam and its war in Vietnam: It was the militarization of the colonized island and its Indigenous inhabitants that turned Guam into an “ideal” dumping ground for the unwanted Viet nam ese refugees, the dis- cards of U.S. war in Vietnam. At the same time, as Jana Lipman argues, the refugee presence bore witness not only to the tenacity but also to the limits of U.S. empire, critically juxtaposing “the United States’ nineteenth- century imperial proj ect with its failed Cold War objectives in Southeast Asia.”1

From Guam, many Viet nam ese refugees journeyed to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, a 125,000- acre amphibious training base on the Southern California coast, in San Diego County. It was here, at a military base, that the largest Viet nam ese population outside of Vietnam got its start in the United States. Like Clark and Andersen Air Force Bases, Camp Pendleton emerged out of a history of conquest: It is located in the tradi- tional territory of the Juaneño, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay Tribes, which had been “discovered” by Spanish padres and voyagers who traveled to South- ern California in the late eigh teenth century, “owned” by unscrupulous Anglo- American settlers for about a century as the California state legis- lature repeatedly blocked federal ratification of treaties with Native com- munities, and ultimately “acquired” by the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942 in order to establish a West Coast base for combat training of Marines. Camp Pendleton’s prized land— its varied topography, which combines a breath- takingly beautiful seventeen- mile shoreline and diverse maneuver areas, making it ideal for combat training environment—is thus what Richard Carrico called “stolen land,” an occupied territory like Guam.2

The material and ideological conversion of U.S. military bases into a place of refuge— a place that resolves the refugee crisis, promising peace and protection— discursively transformed the United States from violent aggressors in Vietnam to benevolent rescuers of its people. This “make over”

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180 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

obscures the violent roles that these military bases— these purported places of refuge— played in the Vietnam War, which spurred the refugee exodus in the first place; the construction of military bases as “refuges” also ob- scures the historical and ongoing settler- colonial occupation of indigenous land, as well as the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples. In the Philippines, from 1965 to 1975, Clark Air Force Base, as the largest overseas U.S. military base in the world, became the major staging base for U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, providing crucial logistical sup- port for the Vietnam War. In Guam, Andersen Air Force Base played a “legendary” role in the Vietnam War, launching devastating bombing mis- sions over North and South Vietnam for close to a de cade. As Robert Rogers documents, Andersen rapidly became the United States’ largest base for B-52 bombers. In 1972, Andersen was the site of the most massive buildup of airpower in history, with more than fifteen thousand crews and over 150 B-52s lining all available flight line space— about five miles long. At its peak, Andersen housed about 165 B-52s.3 The U.S. air war, launched from Guam, decisively disrupted life on the island, underscoring once again the total disregard for the island’s Indigenous inhabitants. Fi nally, as the Department of Defense’s busiest training installation, California’s Camp Pendleton, the refugees’ first home in the United States, trains more than 40,000 active- duty and 26,000 reserve military personnel each year for combat. Camp Pendleton is also the home base of the illustrious 1st Ma- rine Regiment, whose battalions participated in some of the most fero- cious battles of the war. As such, the Pacific military bases, Clark and Andersen Air Force Bases, and California’s Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, credited and valorized for resettling Viet nam ese refugees in 1975, were the very ones responsible for inducing the refugee displacement. The massive tonnage of bombs, along with the ground fighting provided by Marine units like the Camp Pendleton’s 1st Marines, displaced some twelve million people in South Vietnam— almost half the country’s total population at the time— from their homes.

The transvaluation of U.S. military and colonial vio lence into a benev- olent act of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation finds even deeper geneal- ogy in the racialized constitution of U.S. modernity, humanism, and liberalism, all of which continue to shore up what Richard H. Immerman called the “empire for liberty,” or what Oscar V. Campomanes, following William Appleman Williams, in a similar sense called the “anticolonial empire.”4 Williams famously characterized the United States’ Open Door Policy since the nineteenth century as “Amer i ca’s version of the liberal pol- icy of informal empire or free trade imperialism,” which was at the same

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Transpacific Entanglements 181

time driven by “the benevolent American desire to reform the world in its own image.”5 In other words, the United States developed as a colonizing empire even as it disavowed its histories of colonialism and military take- over through the liberal tenets of freedom, consensus, private property, and self- determination. After the Second World War, the genealogy of liberal empire culminated in the Cold War ascendancy of the United States as a leader of the free world who claimed to have replaced the nineteenth- century colonial order in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

The American image of itself as the benevolent liberator and reformer of the people and land it subjugates is sustained by the discursive force of liberal humanism and humanitarianism for which the notion of “debt” is the operative term. In tracking the emergence of new relations of subju- gation around the idea of freedom in the U.S. post- Reconstruction era, Saidiya V. Hartman argues that the trope of debt was deployed to bind the newly emancipated enslaved peoples to a new system of bondage and in- dentureship. Hartman writes: “Emancipation instituted indebtedness. . . . The emancipated were introduced to the cir cuits of exchange through the figurative deployment of debt. . . . The transition from slavery to freedom introduced the free agent to the cir cuits of exchange through this construc- tion of already accrued debt, an abstinent pres ent, and a mortgaged future. In short, to be free was to be a debtor— that is, obliged and duty- bound to others.”6 Though firmly situated in the specific geohistorical con- text of the failure of American Reconstruction, Hartman’s observation of the “figurative deployment of debt” lays out the constitutive contradiction of post- Enlightenment humanism, helping us understand how the Ameri- can notions of freedom, emancipation, liberty, and property owner ship have developed by producing as well as disciplining modernity’s others. This contradiction fundamental to the modern ideals of liberty and freed subjects underpins what we also consider to function as the American myth of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation, a discursive economy of geopoli- tics that consolidated the racialized and heterosexualized logic of subjuga- tion and bondage in the U.S. relationship to Asia throughout the twentieth century.

The American myth of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation then leaves the indelible marks on the liberated of inferiority, subordination, and be- latedness (to freedom, democracy, and property) but also of indebtedness. It assigns “the already accrued debt” to the liberated. Once marked as “the liberated” and therefore “the indebted,” one cannot easily enter into a re- ciprocal relationship with the liberators. This myth, which pres ents both vio lence and liberation as “gifts for the liberated,” has serious implications

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182 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

for the redressability of U.S. military vio lence, as Yoneyama observes of the American aggression in the Iraq War.7 According to this myth, the losses and damages brought on by U.S. military vio lence are deemed “pre- paid debts” incurred by those liberated by American intervention. The injured and violated bodies of the liberated do not seem to require redress according to this discourse of indebtedness, for their liberation has already served as the payment/reparation that supposedly precedes the vio lence inflicted upon them. Furthermore, American myths of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation have seriously threatened the way that postcolonial sov- ereignty might be conceived. As Chungmoo Choi notes, the dominant historiography of U.S.- Korea relations posits the post– World War II “liberation as a gift of the allied forces, especially of U.S.A.”8 This dele- gitimized the agency of Koreans in nation- building in the aftermath of Japa nese colonial rule, which was followed immediately by the Korean War— the “forgotten” war that consolidated the military- securit y- industrial- academic complex— and the ongoing Cold War partition. Mimi Nguyen similarly discusses how the U.S. “gift of freedom” to refugees of the war in Vietnam, imposes indebtedness while binding them to the colonial histories that deemed them “unfree.”9

The predicament of U.S. bases in Okinawa urgently demonstrates the intersection of the settler logic of invasion, removal, and seizure and the American imperialist myth of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation. As a number of critics remind us, there is not one piece of land in Okinawa’s main island that was willingly offered to the U.S. military for use. And yet, under the U.S.- Japan Security Treaty, 75  percent of the entire U.S. base facilities in Japan is accommodated in Okinawa prefecture, which consti- tutes less than 1  percent of Japa nese soil. Okinawa’s subjection to Japan began in the seventeenth century when the Ryukyu kingdom came under the rule of the Shimazu domain, followed by its integration as a prefecture into the modern Meiji state that was then emerging into the nineteenth century international and interimperial order. After the Second World War, the United States “liberated” Okinawa from the many centuries of Japa nese rule. At the same time, the United States insisted on the posses- sion of Okinawa in exchange for the heavy American military sacrifice in the Pacific battlefronts. Okinawa thus remained under U.S. military oc- cupation for nearly three de cades, until its “reversion” to Japan (1945– 1972). During the occupation, the United States formally recognized Japan’s “residual sovereignty” over Okinawa, thereby pre- empting any Okinawan Indigenous claim to local sovereignty. It also insisted that the United States would maintain control over Okinawa until its eventual

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approval as a U.N. trusteeship under U.S. authority. As Toriyama Atsushi points out, the two concepts, “residual sovereignty” and “pending” trustee- ship, allowed the United States’ exclusive management of Okinawa while at the same time helped to contain the Indigenous demands for self- determination and Okinawa’s in de pen dence. What is impor tant to our discussion is that the American recognition of Japan’s “residual sover- eignty” rationalized the United States’ de facto control over the Okinawan land, the ocean, and the airspace, without contradicting its claims to be the supreme leader of freedom and liberty in the postcolonial world.10 The on- going settler logics of invasion, removal, and seizure thus sustains and is in turn secured by the historically rooted and still power ful exceptionalist discourse of the U.S. liberal empire. Yet, it is equally impor tant to remem- ber that this pro cess is far from complete. As Yoneyama argues in her ear- lier work on the politics of memory inspired by Walter Benjamin, what we hope to offer below is a method of unlearning the “universal history”— Marxist, liberal, or other wise—in such a way that would enable us to dis- cern and connect the “missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises in history, as well as unrealized events that might have led to a dif fer ent pres- ent.”11 Such a method calls upon us to link apparently separate subjects, con- texts, and issues whose connections have been rendered unavailable by existing geo graph i cal, po liti cal, and disciplinary bound aries.

Although American exceptionalism, humanitarianism, and national se- curity with re spect to Asia are more often understood as discourses that address international relations, we wish to emphasize that they are critical parts of a neoliberal racial social ordering within the United States as well, which naturalizes white settlement and perpetuates assaults on Black, Muslim, and poor communities of color. In the nineteenth century until World War II, Chinese, Japa nese, Filipino, and South Asians were re- cruited as racialized noncitizen labor and barred from the po liti cal and cultural spheres in the development of the national economy; today, the racialization of Asian immigrants within the United States is no longer ex- clusively that of noncitizen immigrant labor. The U.S. state responded to challenges by radical social movements of the 1960s and decolonization movements worldwide with aggressive incorporative mea sures, from the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, to the large- scale capital investment in the development and rapid “integra- tion” of Asia into global capitalism. Within these conditions, the racial- ization of Asian Americans as the model minority has been crucial to the pernicious fictions of multiculturalism and “postracial” inclusion, just as modernization discourse has in an analogous fashion “racialized” the newly

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184 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

industrialized Asian nations to be what Takashi Fujitani calls “model” mo- dernity nations.12 Sociologist Hijin Park discusses this neoliberal position- ing of the “East Asian miracle” as the discourse of “rising Asia.”13 The “rising Asia” discourse opposes newly industrialized Asia to less “devel- oped” countries in Africa, Latin Amer i ca, Central Asia; it is comple- mented by the fiction of Asian “culture” as traditionally patriarchal and heteronormative, a fiction employed, as Chandan Reddy argues, to disci- pline black, brown, and queer of color communities, as “backward” and threatening.14

These new racial formations signal forms of governance that represent “Asians” as included in both the U.S. nation and in global capitalism, even as Asian and Pacific Islander peoples are forcibly dislocated from sites in which the United States has occupied, interned, and conducted imperial war. In other words, violent exclusion from national belonging has char- acterized the historical emergence of the United States from its beginnings: justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and Jim Crow segregation, the stolen labors of indentured and immigrant workers, and the losses of life as the United States waged wars in Latin Amer i ca, East, Northeast, and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia. Yet within the formation we call “neoliberalism,” vio lence accompanies not only exclusion from the nation but also inclusion into it: as “emancipated” slave, indebted poor, grateful immigrant, or rehabilitated inmate. The vio lence of inclusion, an operation that proposes to convert subjugated others into normative humanity and multicultural citizenship, is clearly also a pro cess of racial governance. Yên Espiritu elaborates this concept as “differential inclusion,” to counter the myth of “voluntary” im- migration and to emphasize the pro cesses through which dif fer ent groups are “included” yet si mul ta neously legally subordinated, eco nom ically ex- ploited, or culturally degraded, often in relation to one another.15 The rela- tive inclusions of Asians and Pacific Islander peoples by postwar racial liberalism, which appeared to legitimize an official antiracism, provided the United States moral legitimacy as it sought to gain Cold War hege- mony against the Soviet Union.16 It built upon the fiction of the U.S. state as the guarantor of civil rights and suppressed radical challenges— from Black Power to third world decolonization movements— even as it ex- tended U.S. militarism and neoliberal capitalism globally.

Con temporary neoliberalism naturalizes the market, buttresses the pri- macy of the deserving individual, and instantiates the superiority of the private over the public; it moreover affirms “colorblindness” that disavows the per sis tence of antiblackness, promotes a discourse of “rising Asia” that

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masks the longer history of North Atlantic empires, and it denies ongoing settler colonialism while justifying imperial war and military basing that occupies, dispossesses, and displaces Indigenous communities. Neoliber- alism erases the longer history in which “emancipation,” “ free wage labor,” and “ free trade” have enabled the development of what Cedric Robinson calls “racial capitalism”— built upon settler colonialism, slavery, indenture, and unfree immigrant labor.17 Grace Hong characterizes the current mo- ment of neoliberal restructuring as an epistemological structure of dis- avowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered vio lence has been overcome, while disavowing the continuing assaults on inassimilable poor communities of color.18 We suggest that where many theorists of neolib- eralism, whether inspired by Marx, Weber, or Foucault, observe the de- fining feature of neoliberalism to be the generalization of the market logic of exchange to all spheres of human life, this definition of neoliberalism of- ten leaves unchallenged such disavowal, and we argue that the critique of neoliberalism must be nuanced in relation to the much longer histories of racial capitalism, colonialism, and militarism.19 In light of the commod- ification of human life within slavery, colonialism, as well as in con temporary global capitalism, we insist that what is currently theorized as a “new” fi- nancialization of human life under neoliberalism occurred brutally and routinely and continues to occur throughout the course of modern em- pires. Indeed, what Lowe discusses elsewhere as the “colonial division of humanity” is a signature feature of long- standing liberal modes of distinc- tion that privilege par tic u lar lives as “ human” and treat other lives as the laboring, replaceable, or disposable contexts that constitute that “human- ity.”20 In their recent work on neoliberal forms of “surrogate humanity”— whether gestational surrogacy in India, life extension through medical technologies, or the advanced automation of labor by Amazon robotics— Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue that even “post- human” con- cepts and practices continue to reproduce racial, gender, and geopo liti cal hierarchies of social difference.21

The national security imperatives developed during the Cold War have been critical to the neoliberal reor ga ni za tion of the state and economy, with consequences for the domestic racial order, which involves the withdrawal of the state from its traditional purpose of social welfare to investment in the repressive arms of the U.S. state: policing, drug enforcement, immi- gration and border patrol, and prisons— all of which racialize and divide in the distribution of punishments. The privatization of traditional public “goods,” such as schooling, health care, and social securities further con- tributes to the precarity of poor communities of color, while the buildup

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186 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

of policing, detention, and prisons targets and suppresses U.S. black, brown, and Muslim communities. The links between U.S. militarism abroad and policing at home is nowhere more evident than in the Israeli training of police serving in Ferguson, Missouri, who suppressed the community pro- testing Michael Brown’s death with military surplus equipment such as aircraft, armored vehicles, assault rifles, grenades, vests, and tear gas.22 Re- becca Bohrman and Naomi Murakawa ironically term this refortification of the repressive arms of the state the “remaking big government,” while Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this a transformation from the “welfare state” to the “warfare state.”23 The national security discourse exonerates the neoliberal state for its violent antiblackness and Islamophobia.

The “Asian American” has often been made to serve as the sign that me- diates this disavowal of the racial ordering called “postraciality” or “col- orblindness,” the deployment of which governs this neoliberal restructuring of culture, society, economy, and politics. Whether expressed through Asian immigrant exclusion or inclusion, the U.S. state has produced itself as a global power through the formation of the “Asian American” as a means to resolve the contradictions of the U.S. racial capitalism and its im- perial military proj ect. Yet we wish to emphasize that for this reason, now, as before, the “Asian American” is a critical mediating figure for diagnosing racial power and geopo liti cal ordering. Rather than stabilizing binary categories of white/nonwhite, settler/native, or developed/underdeveloped, the “Asian American” continues still to mediate racial relationality or to triangulate these terms. Asian racial formation continues to shed light on how race is not fixed or essential but a shifting designation within what Stuart Hall terms society “structured- in- dominance.”24 Asian racial formations—as noncitizen labor, as model minority, as threatening cap i- tal ist rival— devalue Asians and mea sure and mediate geopo liti cal and na- tional transformations. In our current moment, Asianness as “model minority/model modernity” is an index of the pres ent U.S. settler racial order that reduces and dehumanizes blackness as surplus population, con- structs Indigenous peoples as extinct or vanishing, and frames Muslims as threatening vio lence.

In conclusion, we conceive U.S. racial empire as an open pro cess, an unfolding of dynamic, multiple relations of rule and re sis tance. Alyosha Goldstein discusses U.S. colonialism as “a continuously failing, perpetu- ally incomplete, proj ect that labors to find a workable means of resolution to sustain its logic of possession by disavowing ongoing contestation.”25 Like Goldstein, we understand U.S. racial empire to be continuously fail- ing and incomplete, which suggests that its destruction, exploitation, and

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Transpacific Entanglements 187

administration is never total, that its cruelty and cunning produces con- tingency and excess that we cannot entirely know or anticipate. In Body Counts, Espiritu frames the possibility of anti- imperial collaborations through critical juxtaposition, which she elaborates by interpreting the ge- ography of Viet nam ese refugee flight in 1975: The refugees were taken by military aircraft and routed through U.S. bases, from Vietnam to the Phil- ippines to Guam and then to California. This itinerary connects Viet- nam ese postwar displacement to that of settler colonialism and militarism that has dispossessed Filipino, Chamorro, and Native American peoples and gives rise to an antimilitarist association of incommensurable yet linked groups. This is what Yoneyama describes, in Cold War Ruins, as transpa- cific cultures of reckoning and redress in the face of unredressable war and vio lence. The related, yet often illegible, strug gles against these inter- locking formations are the pos si ble po liti cal itineraries that Lowe evokes in Intimacies as “connections that could have been, but were lost, and are thus, not yet.”26 Thus, in our piece, we take a comparative relational ap- proach and employ the method of critical juxtaposition— the deliberate bringing together of seemingly dif fer ent historical events in an effort to reveal what would other wise remain invisible—in this case, to examine the contours, contents, and limits of U.S. imperialism, wars, and genocide in the Asia- Pacific region and racialization on the U.S. mainland. We gesture toward, and call into being, what Yoneyama calls the competing “yearnings” for “justice beyond judicialization” across unlike, asymmetri- cal, yet linked terrains.27 We can and must always make “Asia” and “Asian American” signify more than American exceptionalism.

Not es

1. Jana K. Lipman, “ ‘Give Us a Ship’: The Viet nam ese Repatriate Move- ment on Guam, 1975,” American Quarterly 64 (2012): 3–4 (emphasis added). 2. Richard Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land: Indians of San Diego County from Prehistory to the New Deal (Newcastle, Calif.: Sierra Oaks, 1987). 3. Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). 4. Oscar V. Campomanes, “1898 and the Nature of the New Empire,” Radical History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 130–46. See also Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wol fo witz (Prince ton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 2010). 5. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1959), 67, 47.

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188 Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama

6. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self- Making in Nineteenth- Century Amer i ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131. 7. Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice: Ameri- canization of Japa nese War Crimes at the End of the Post- Cold War,” Journal of Asian American Studies (February 2003): 57–63. 8. Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popu lar Memory: South Korea,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1, no. 1 (1993): 80. 9. Mimi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). 10. Atsushi Toriyama, “Okinawa’s ‘Postwar’: Some Observations on the Formation of American Military Bases in the Aftermath of Terrestrial Warfare,” trans. David Buist, in The Inter- Asia Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Kuan Hsing Chen and Beng H. Chua, 267–88 (London: Routledge, 2007), 273. 11. Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19. 12. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japa nese and Japa nese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 13. Hijin Park, “Neoliberalizing Differential Racialization: Asian Uplift, Indigenous Death, and Blackness as Surplus,” pre sen ta tion, McMaster University, October 2012. 14. Chandan Reddy, “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights,” Social Text 84–85, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (Fall– Winter 2005): 101–19. 15. Yên Lê Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino Lives across Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 47–48. 16. On “racial liberalism” and the postwar incorporation of racialized minorities, see especially Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Vio lence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 17. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 18. Grace Kyungwon Hong, Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 19. See for example, Thomas Lemke (“The Birth of Bio- politics: Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France on Neo- liberal Governmental- ity,” Economy and Society 30, no. 2 [May 2001]: 190–207), who argues that neoliberalism is characterized by the collapse of the distinction between liberal economy and liberal governance and the withdrawal of the state in favor of the apotheosis of the economy such that neoliberal subjects are

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Transpacific Entanglements 189

controlled precisely through their “freedom.” Wendy Brown explains that neoliberalism involves “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action”; “all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality”; and the state ceases to be “the Hegelian constitutional state conceived as the universal repre sen ta tion of the people.” Wendy Brown, “Neo- liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Prince ton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 2005), 40–41. See also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 20. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 107. 21. Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski, “Surrogate Humanity: Posthu- man Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–40. 22. Kristian Davis Bailey, “The Ferguson/Palestine Connection,” Ebony, August 19, 2014, http:// www . ebony . com / news - views / the - fergusonpalestine - connection - 403; Tom Giratikanon, Alicia Parlapiano, and Jeremy White, “Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear,” New York Times, August 15, 2014, http:// www . nytimes . com / interactive / 2014 / 08 / 15 / us / surplus - military - equipment - map . html. 23. Rebecca Bohrman and Naomi Murakawa, “Remaking Big Govern- ment,” in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison- Industrial Complex, ed. Julia Sudbury (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Global- ization and U.S. Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post- Keynesian Militarism,” Race & Class 40, nos. 2–3 (1998–1999): 171–88. 24. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Socie ties Structured in Domi- nance,” in Black British Cultural Studies, ed. Houston A. Baker and Manthia Diawara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 25. Alyosha Goldstein, ed., Formations of United States Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 3. 26. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 174. 27. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 205.

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