1
2

3.On Insurgent Possibilities (250 Words)

“Asian American feminist visibility routed through a praxis of horizontal coalitional boundary crossing thus clarifies the racial third space of Asian America as an insurgent epistemic locus that opens    toward a Women of Color consciousness of our interdependent realities and  possibilities.”

Shireen Roshanravan concludes her essay by writing that Asian Americans might be able to occupy an “insurgent” space of possibility. How do you understand insurgency at this point? How can we take on this insurgency? What does it mean for us to think insurgently?

T R A N S P A C I F I C L I T E R A R Y P R O J E C TT R A N S P A C I F I C L I T E R A R Y P R O J E C T

You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else
Mythologies have their way of explaining the basic human condition: that there will always be some where or

thing you wish to get to or back to.

By Dao Strom

D
ao Strom

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|

JULY 10, 2018

Dao Strom’s latest experimental poetry book, You Will Always Be Someone from Somewhere Else, is both “a
collection and a re-collection.” Fragments of family memories, the muddy history of the war, archival
photographs, and ruminations on the nation-state are coupled together in English and Vietnamese, translated by
Ly Thuy Nguyen. “Mythologies have their way of explaining the basic human condition: that there will always be
some where or thing you wish to get to or back to,” writes Strom in this excerpt, which winds through myth,
history, and the self to get to that very “some where.”

+

You will always be someone from somewhere else

This is a design flaw of water

+

Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ.

Đấy là lỗi dòng lội nước.

+ –

Sometimes  parents will give  their children mythologies when they can  no longer
stomach history. From my mother I learned the prototypical origin myth, that one
about the hand lifting earth to mouth and the inconceivability of the mountain to
hold the water that inevitably leaves her for the sea. Mythologies have their way of
explaining  the basic  human condition: that there  will always be some where or
thing you wish to get to or back to. Which is another way of saying they explain:
wars.

POETRY , , , , , DAO STROM LY THUY NGUYEN POETRY TUESDAY VIETNAMESE POETRY TRANSLATION

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Longing is a state of mind.
Which is also to say longing is a mental love.

+ –

Đôi lúc cha mẹ sẽ kể trẻ nghe chuyện thần thoại khi lịch sử không còn giữ được
yên trong dạ. Từ mẹ tôi đã học về thần thoại nguyên bản, thần thoại kể về bàn
tay nhặt đất lên mồm và sự vô tưởng của núi non không ôm được dòng nước đã
để lại nàng cho biển. Thần thoại có cách riêng giải thích cho những điều kiện sơ
khởi của loài người: rằng sẽ luôn có một nơi nào đó hay điều gì đó mình ước
được đến hay về. Cũng là một cách nói khác về việc thần thoại lý giải chiến
tranh.

Trông mong là một thức trạng.
Cũng là để nói rằng trong mong là tình yêu tâm thức.

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((the sea))

((the sea))

((biển cả))

((biển cả))

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+

But then the water comes back:

Nhưng nước nào rồi cũng ngược dòng:

mang dạng hình nước mắt in the form of tears

((rain)).
((mưa)).

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+ –

This is the wound

Đây là vết rách

từ đó ta rời khỏi.

we came out of.

+ –

I grew up listening to my parents fight. It should not have been a surprise, given
the wars of their own childhoods, Europe and Vietnam, respectively. But that is not 
the kind of  thing one  comprehends  as a child,  either about one’s parents or about
wars. I would lay in bed in the dark listening to them threaten to leave and never
return and I thought this was how you loved. But then some mornings I awoke and
it was just the crisis in the Middle East they were arguing about.

+ –

Tôi lớn lên nghe ba mẹ cãi nhau. Cũng chẳng có gì đáng ngạc nhiên, nếu biết
những cuộc chiến tranh của trẻ thơ tuổi họ, châu Âu và Việt Nam, mỗi người
một nỗi. Nhưng đấy không phải điều trẻ con hiểu được, cả về ba mẹ nó lẫn về
cách làm ba mẹ. Tôi luôn nằm trên giường trong bóng tối lắng nghe hai người
dọa sẽ bỏ đi và không bao giờ trở lại và tôi cứ nghĩ đấy là cách người ta yêu
nhau. Nhưng rồi một sáng nọ tôi thức giấc và thực ra họ chỉ đang tranh luận về
vùng Trung Á.

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+ –

The root of the
word “country”
takes us back to contra (“against”) and to a phrase where the concept of “country”
is arrived at via an act of seeing the terrain spread out before one: terra contrata:
the body must separate itself from what it views, in order to name said vision.
Hence, the act of first citing or sighting land also becomes one’s initiation of
separation.  I am against the land.  I am against the country. Our perpendicularity
to what is beneath, our right-angle-ness, predicates each act of claim and/or
divide. In 1960-something, my mother cut her hair short and refused to hand out
invitations to her sister’s wedding engagement. When  you get up off  your knees  
you disrupt  the flow of the lore of the tribe. You disrupt the natural architecture of
the horizon, and the sentence. Now you had better learn to swim, or sing.

+ –

Rễ của từ “đất nước” bắt nguồn từ contra (“phản”) và cách nó nối liền sự hình
thành của “đất nước” nằm ở việc nhìn nhận địa hình địa vật lan tỏa trước mắt:
tera contrata: thân thể phải tách rời khỏi thứ nó nhìn để mà đặt tên điều viễn
kiến. Bởi thế, sự ngắm nghía đầu đời một vùng đất cũng chính là bài học vỡ lòng
của chia ly. Tôi phản lại đất. Tôi phản lại nước. Sự trực giao của ta đối với những
gì bên dưới, góc-độ-chính-xác của ta, là vị ngữ của từng chủ từ khai nhận và/ hay  
phân  tách.  Một  năm 60  nọ, mẹ  tôi cắt tóc  ngắn và  khước từ việc đưa thiệp  mời
đám cưới của bác gái. Khi mình nhỏm gối đứng dậy mình đập tan dòng lội khởi
thủy của tổ tông. Mình đập tan tầng kiến trúc tự  nhiên,  và cả  câu  từ. Thế  thì mình
nên tập bơi, hay tập hát.

+ –

She was  trying  to make up  her  mind  and she couldn’t,  so she  took herself to   a

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movie. Culture beckons. Bombs  fall.  The tanks  were  approaching  the city and a
spring black was descending. She would never see Rome in person, she thought,
would never lay eyes on the aspirational architecture of any of those self-
congratulating civilizations, if she stayed. My father meanwhile felt sick at even
just the thought of the word. Leave.

+ –

Nàng đang cố quyết nhưng không thể, nên nàng bỏ đi xem phim. Văn hóa vẫy
gọi. Bom rơi. Bọn xe tăng đang tiến gần thành phố và một máy bay đang hạ cánh.
Nàng sẽ chẳng bao giờ tận mắt thấy thành Rome, nàng tự nhủ, sẽ không bao giờ
lia mắt qua những kiến trúc đầy khát vọng của những nền văn minh tự huyễn
nọ, nếu nàng ở lại. Trong khi đó ba tôi thì chỉ mới nghĩ đến cái từ đó thôi đã phát
bệnh. Ra đi.

+

I returned for the first time in 1996. On the beach in Lăng Cô, I sat one evening
with a boy who sold postcards.

—The lost people of Japan, they come a lot too. The lost people like to buy postcards.
—Lost people? What do you mean?
—You are lost people of Vietnam. They all go long time ago and today come back.
—Tourists, you mean. Travelers.

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—Tourist? What is tourist?
—The lost people. The people who like to buy postcards.

+

Tôi trở lại lần đầu năm 1996. Ở bãi biển Lăng Cô, một chiều tà nọ tôi ngồi với
một cậu bé bán bưu thiếp.

—Mấy người đi lạc của Nhật, họ cũng hay đến đây. Người đi lạc rất thích mua bưu thiếp.
—Người đi lạc? Ý em là sao?
—Chị là người đi lạc của Việt Nam. Mấy người rời đi hồi xa lắc và hồi này trở lại.
—Ý em là khách du lịch. Du khách ấy.
—Du khách? Du khách là gì?
—Người đi lạc. Những người thích mua bưu thiếp.

+

Separation  myth is  a middle-class  prestige we pull.  My own marriage has more
than once been beset  upon by it.  One year I thought  a cure  might  be enacted by
returning together to the place I’d previously traveled to alone, which was also the
originating place I had been severed from.  I wore wings  for this trip.  We  traveled 
along  hectic,  inhospitable  roads  to  the  oldest  standing  stones  we could make our
way to. The ruins of the Champa civilization were called “discovered” in the late
1800s, by French archaeologists who were enthralled at having found such cultural
treasures. The Vietnamese, who presumably already knew of those stone feats in
the jungle, may’ve thought it just as well to let the jungle keep them. For you have
to let the jungle have something: or she will take back everything eventually. But
white men come, and often they are intent on saving or vanquishing when they do.
On our marriage-saving trip, I hauled my wings in a blue plastic case from north to
south. Everywhere we went, the items we bought, entry fees we paid, cost double
or triple the local fare, exacted from us with distrustful, scrutinizing eyes. Some
charges were blatantly duplicitous. At moments anger would mount in me. I am
from here too,  I wanted to shout,  and I’ve spent a  lifetime caring,  and  carrying,
what you think I’ve forgotten, what you think making us pay more for now will
somehow vindicate. At the same time I understood well enough where the urge for
retribution came from, the years and dynamics implicit. Wool-sick  nature of my
own tongue;  white partner beside me. At the Dalat airport the security officer sent
me back to the airline desk to pay  more tacked-on fees and  at Tan Son Nhut  we

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had  to  buy our airtickets to Cambodia twice. These small harassments felt like
tolls being exacted for something I could not quite put my finger on. Then I set my
wings down in the Siem Reap airport. And they were gone when I turned back for
them.

+

Bí ẩn về chia ly là thứ trò thượng hạng mà tầng lớp trung lưu chúng ta chơi.
Chính hôn sự của bản thân tôi cũng đã từng bị nó bao vây. Một năm nọ tôi đã
nghĩ có thể chữa lành bằng cách cùng nhau quay trở lại nơi tôi từng đến một
mình, cũng chính là cái nơi khởi tổ mà tôi đã bị tước khỏi. Tôi đeo cánh cho
chuyến đi này. Chúng tôi du hành dọc những con đường hớt hải, không mến
khách đến những hòn đá cổ xưa nhất chúng tôi có thể đặt chân. Những di tích
của nền văn minh Chămpa được “phát hiện” cuối thế kỉ 19, bởi những nhà khảo
cổ Pháp mê muội trước ý tưởng tìm thấy những cổ vật văn hóa như vậy. Người
Việt Nam, hẳn vốn luôn biết về những tảng đá trong rừng, chắc đã nghĩ thôi cứ
để rừng già giữ chúng. Bởi vì chúng ta phải để cho rừng già giữ một thứ gì: nếu
không rồi nàng sẽ lấy lại toàn bộ. Nhưng đàn ông da trắng đến, và khi họ đến họ
thường có ý cứu giúp hay chiếm ngự. Trong chuyến đi hòng cứu vớt hôn nhân
của tôi, tôi kéo đôi cánh của mình đi trong một cái hộp nhựa màu xanh từ bắc tới
nam. Mọi nơi chúng tôi đi, những thứ đồ chúng tôi mua, những phí ra vào chúng
tôi trả, đều đắt gấp đôi hay gấp ba giá địa phương, đòi hỏi từ chúng tôi với
những đôi mắt nghi ngờ buộc tội. Có những món tiền hiển nhiên quá đáng. Có
những lúc lòng tôi đầy tức giận. Tôi cũng đến từ nơi đây mà, tôi muốn hét lên, và
tôi đã sống cả đời mong ngóng, và mang theo, những gì các người nghĩ rằng tôi
đã quên, những gì các người nghĩ rằng bắt chúng tôi trả nhiều tiền hơn thì mới
chứng minh được rằng chúng tôi thực nhớ. Cùng lúc đó tôi cũng hiểu rõ nguồn
cơn của sự đền bù này, những tháng năm và sự phân cách tiềm ẩn. Cặn chữ lắng
trên lưỡi; cạnh tôi là bạn đời da trắng. Ở sân bay Đà Lạt người bảo vệ bắt tôi
quay lại bàn sân bay để trả thêm lộ phí và ở Tân Sơn Nhứt chúng tôi phải mua vé
máy bay đến Campuchia hai lần. Những sự quấy rối nho nhỏ này giống như đánh
thuế một cái gì đó mà tôi không thể chạm tay vào. Rồi ở Siêm Riệp tôi để đôi
cánh xuống. Lúc tôi ngoảnh lại nhìn chúng đã biến mất.

Donate!

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+ –

My
mother 
favored the
adage by  
Thomas
Wolfe:
“You  can
never go home.”  There are pilgrims praying to Buddhist altars under the Hindu
friezes, and the temple roofs and doorways are shaped like labia. I read somewhere
that Neil Young wrote his song about Cortez the killer after a high school history
lesson. The guitar solo too is a snake. Jagging and asymmetric, hissing at ground-
level through the song, it is the white man’s best way of evincing that he is both
wild and sorry. It comes dancing across the water. Anti-instinct and ancestral. The
snake-charmer with his fingertips executes the map. In the ruins: I want to take off
my clothes. Every person is deficient in at least one of the four directions.

+ –

Mẹ tôi yêu thích vô cùng câu nói của Thomas Wolfe: “Ngươi sẽ không thể về
nhà.” Có những người hành hương cầu dưới bàn thờ Phật ở đền chùa Hindu,
những mái chùa và cửa bên mang hình dạng môi ngoài âm vật. Tôi đọc đâu đó
Neil Young viết ca khúc về kẻ sát nhân  Cortez sau một bài học  lịch  sử  trung  học.
Đoạn độc tấu guitar cũng là một con rắn. Lởm chởm và bất đối xứng, rít lên ở hạ
tầng xuyên suốt bài hát, đấy là cách tốt  nhất  để  đàn  ông da  trắng chứng  tỏ rằng
hắn hoang dại và hối tiếc. Nó tới nhảy múa qua làn nước. Chống bản năng và
tính tổ. Người thôi miên rắn với những đầu ngón tay thi hành bản đồ. Trong khu
di tích: tôi muốn cởi hết áo quần. Ai cũng kém cỏi ít nhất một trong bốn hướng.

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Dao S tromDao S trom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to

contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author a hybrid-forms memoir We Were Meant
To Be a Gentle People + music album East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006)
and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003). Her latest work is a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From
Somewhere Else, published by the Hanoi-based AJAR Press (2018). Her work has received support from the Creative Capital
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Arts Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and others.

She is the editor of diaCRITICS.

Ly Thuy Nguyen is that hybrid Viet youngster with different realities in different cities. On a good day, she is finishing her

PhD in San Diego, California. Her research is on the personal and the political of human geographic stories, interAsian

connections and global queer futurity. On a better day, she is translating some interesting and important works—there are

more to come. On any given day, she is figuring out her complicated relationship to poetry and life.

This excerpt is reprinted from You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else by Dao Strom. Vietnamese translation by Ly Thuy

Nguyen. Used with permission of the publisher, Ajar Press. All rights reserved.

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The Bridge at No Gun Ri

“I didn’t care whether they
understood me, then I said, ‘Hello,
hello,’ again, soldiers climbed out of
their foxholes and looked at me,
they couldn’t understand, but they
knew where I came from, they just
looked at me”

“A GENTLEMAN IS SIMPLY A
PATIENT WOLF”

America swallowed my parents /
spit out skeletons / Waleed became
Bill / the Clintons stretched / their
skinny vowels / over my father’s
father’s father’s name

노팬티 — No Panties

치마를 까뒤집던 꽃들이 / 태양의 먼 어깨
위로 투신한다 / 나무들이 입던 속옷을 벗
어 깃발처럼 흔드는 정원에서

Ta g s : Ta g s : Dao Strom, , Ly Thuy Nguyen, , Poetry Tuesday, , Vietnamese, , poetry, , translation

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Page 13 of 13

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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Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

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P a r t I I I

Remapping Asia, Recalibrating Asian Amer i ca

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175

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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Transpacific Entanglements 183

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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Transpacific Entanglements 185

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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http://www.ebony.com/news-views/the-fergusonpalestine-connection-403

http://www.ebony.com/news-views/the-fergusonpalestine-connection-403

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/us/surplus-military-equipment-map.html

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/us/surplus-military-equipment-map.html