Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai'i and the Making of US Empire [Hardcover]

Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. InSettler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.USJuliet Nebolon reveals the mechanisms through which settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of US empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands.Juliet Nebolon is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College.“Settler Militarismis a timely and urgently needed analysis of settler colonial governance and US militarism. Juliet Nebolon adeptly theorizes ‘settler militarism’ as a confluence of biopolitical regimes, racialized social reproduction, wartime pedagogies, and colonial-military spatial practices deployed in the name of national security to justify Native Hawaiian land dispossession. ThilS?