Sublime

In the developing American empire, the relationship between visuality, racialization, and domination is most arguably realized with American Indian subjects.

The bill passed, and speculators scrambled to stake their claims. It was another land rush, this time in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The first batch of islands was added to the United States in 1857. By 1863, the government had annexed fifty-nine islands. By the time the last claim was filed, in 1902, the United States’ oceanic empire encompasse

Tenet began pushing aggressively to bulk up the CIA’s paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, and he sold the White House on a program to capture terrorists, hide them in secret jails, and subject them to an Orwellian regimen of brutal interrogation methods.

Colonialism has fundamentally altered our relationships with the web of life, and we are all living with its consequences. When Europe began its pillage of the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Indigenous cosmologies of reciprocity, relationships with and duties of care for water, land, and living beings were uprooted, replaced with a worldview animated

What Jack Abramoff had discovered in Saipan was the same thing the Bush administration lawyer John Yoo had discovered in Guantánamo Bay: empire is still around, and places with anomalous legal statuses can be extremely useful.

The story of internment in the Greater United States does not end with Hawaiian martial law or the Aleuts’ relocation. Though the episode is barely known, the United States interned Japanese in the Philippines, too. Roosevelt signed the infamous Executive Order 9906, calling for the internment of Japanese in the U.S. West, in February 1942, after m

Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands stretched out toward Japan, reducing the Pacific Ocean “to the width of a ferry boat channel,” as one journalist put it. When Alaska had been annexed, in 1867, this had been a promising feature: the islands were stepping-stones to Asia. Now, however, it seemed more likely that the foot traffic would go in the other

European armies had evolved into highly specialized machines to fight each other – but not to fight military forces whose ‘strategic doctrine’ was radically different. This was painfully apparent in the encounters between British troops and Native Americans in the 1750s.