Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 260 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 9781478018315.
Jodi Kim’s new book is an ambitious undertaking. Even the list of themes in the book’s subtitle does not fully indicate the range of conceptual material Kim weaves into the account of US settler colonialism and transpacific imperialism. Settler Garrison ranges broadly across topics that include debt, the US archipelago of military bases and the “transpacific military-sexual complex” (78), POWs and psychological warfare operations, the significance of unincorporated territory (specifically, Guam), and the concept of an ecological debt to island nations and peoples. This thick conceptual weave is articulated through both theoretical discussion (particularly in the introduction and chapter 1) and interpretation of cultural documents (films, plays, books, poems) that express what Kim calls “the aesthetics of settler imperial failure” (16), the varied refusals of US empire by Pacific actors.
While Settler Garrison is shaped by certain Korean experiences—the book begins with an alert reading of the movie Parasite—a major purpose of Kim’s work is to refuse and counter implicit characterizations of the Pacific as a kind of “flyover” and “mostly empty oceanic expanse” (138–139). Toward this end, Kim anchors discussions of the sites of settler imperialism—military bases and camp towns, POW camps, and unincorporated territory—in critical artistic work from the Pacific Islands.
In the introduction, Kim outlines the key concepts in the work along with the methodology that brings them together. One of the important issues broached here is how to deal with the clear distinctions between settler colonialism and its impact upon Indigenous peoples of the Americas—summarized by Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination,” with its dominant drive to acquire land by replacing the Indigenous population with settlers (21–22)—and the forms of transpacific imperialism which do not display precisely the same “logic of elimination.” For Kim, this invites consideration of the racial dimensions of imperialism, summarized by Maile Arvin as “possession through whiteness,” a process that Kim sees as indicative of the fact that settler colonial dispossession is not a fait accompli but rather part of an ongoing struggle (22).
Recognition of deep connections between US settler colonialism and transpacific imperialism is not new. I would note especially Richard Drinnon’s important 1980 work, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (University of Oklahoma Press), which traces US settler imperial violence from the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to the US war in the Philippines and on to Vietnam. But Kim aims to not only fill out the many “empty” transpacific spaces left by accounts like these but to provide a more detailed analysis of the various cultural dimensions of imperialism.
Chapter 1 is in many ways the conceptual keystone of this effort. Here, Kim outlines an approach to debt in which, following Sylvia Wynter, the debtor/creditor relation is not determined by economics but rather predetermined by the broader “culture-systemic logic” of the North/West (57). This shifts the discussion from the economics of debt to the need for an “epistemological revolution” that reveals how prevailing conceptions of debt involve a “sleight of hand” that turns actual creditors (e.g., those who have “given” through their dispossession, enslavement, and exploitation) into debtors. Thus, for Kim, one central component of the refusal of transpacific settler imperialism is the project of refusing existing conceptions of who is indebted (and why). Again, reconsideration of the debt crisis and its effects—including on Pacific Island nations—is not a new topic; but Kim aims to bring the cultural dimensions of this into the foreground, thus enabling us to understand how it can be that certain populations, e.g., on Guam, feel not only economically but morally indebted to those who dominate their lives, this reaching such an extent that Chomorros on Guam have remarkably high enlistment rates in the US military and disproportionate fatalities when fighting (161).
The chapters on bases, POWs, and unincorporated territories, chapters 2 through 4, each instantiate some aspects of these claims about indebtedness in different ways. Chapter 2 examines, especially, how women from countries and specific regions (the Philippines, Japan/Okinawa, South Korea) that are dominated by the US military engage in militarized sex work that is a form of debt bondage, exploring this through works such as Rachel Rivera’s documentary Sin City Diary and Kishaba Jun’s short story Dark Flowers. Chapter 3 examines POW camps in Korea and the pressure placed on POWs in these camps to renounce communism, a story told in part through Ha Jin’s novel War Trash. Chapter 4 examines the unincorporated territory of Guam, a major US military base, and one featuring the kinds of indebtedness imposed on (and internalized by) many Chomorros as I’ve just noted. The epilogue adds to all this a discussion of climate imperialism/debt and the US military’s role—as the world’s largest carbon emitter—in endangering the lives of Pacific Islanders.
Importantly, all of these cases highlight pieces of the US military’s archipelagic empire: e.g., Okinawa, Koje Island (the site of the Korean War POW story), and Guam. In short, Kim fills in spaces that have been too often presented as Pacific “flyover” spaces. Finally, Settler Garrison taps these spaces to conclude with a testimony to settler imperial failure, the assertion by Chamorros of an alternative concept of debt, inafa’ maolek, meaning “to make things good for each other” (173).
While this provides a hopeful conclusion, I would note that the creative stretches in Kim’s weave do leave a few thin patches, where a more deeply anchored political economy of production and class politics would be useful. Such, I would claim, is true of the sections on China and its emergence as a major creditor, based on its exploding material and military production capacity (e.g., 52). Nonetheless, Settler Garrison is a powerful antidote to conceptions of the Pacific as merely a US mare nostrum.
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver