Browsing by Subject "Empire"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943
    (2020-08) Weber, Kent
    “Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943,” interrogates the confluences between United States’ immigration control and overseas territorial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chinese exclusion laws, some of the earliest federal U.S. immigration laws and the first to name and discriminate against a particular migrant group based on their race, informed and moved with U.S. empire to recreate physical, political, and social borders in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The dissertation traces how efforts to control the transnational migrations of Chinese to and between Cuba, Hawai’i, and the United States became a tool for the geographic movement of U.S. state power as American borders expanded for empire and further attempted to control and limit the movements of Chinese migrants. By examining Cuba and Hawai’i together, the dissertation argues that the exclusion laws offered an adaptable system of corporeal control that aided U.S. colonial projects in each place. The spread of the Chinese exclusion laws outside the continental United States by the end of the nineteenth century did not only occur in the context of expanding U.S. empire, but also helped to define and constitute the boundaries of America’s new imperial domain.
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    Displaced by Revolution: Loyalists in Limbo within the Spanish Empire
    (Age of Revolutions, 2023-06-08) Chambers, Sarah C.
    Thousands of Spanish subjects were displaced by first the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s and then the Spanish American wars of independence from 1810-1825. Some fled to foreign countries, but many prioritized areas still controlled by Spain, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico. Unlike British loyalists from North America, few received compensation for the losses they had incurred. Displaced imperial administrators did receive pensions valued at two-thirds of their salary until they could return to their former positions. But, with the exception of some in Puerto Rico, civilians, mostly born in the colonies, were not guaranteed assistance. Although Spanish subjects in Spanish territory, they found themselves in limbo, as they were seen as outsiders and expected to return to their places of origin once the Crown had suppressed the revolutions.
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    Empire of the people: the ideology of democratic empire in the antebellum United States
    (2014-07) Dahl, Adam J.
    Settler colonialism played a constitutive role in the construction of democratic culture in the antebellum United States. This dissertation argues that democratic values of popular sovereignty and social equality acquired their conceptual coherence and institutional realization through settler conquest and indigenous dispossession. Out of this dynamic emerged an "ideology of democratic empire," a distinct ideological formation in which the active agent of expansion is not colonial administration or the imperial state but the people in their sovereign capacity for self-government. In this mode of empire, settler conquest acted as a form of foundational violence that enabled the construction of a new democratic society through the elimination of indigenous sovereignty. I trace the ideological development of democratic empire in three phases. First, federalist discourses in the revolutionary period provided a new world conception of empire that privileged the equality of quasi-sovereign settler communities over notions of empire organized around the governance of colonial dependencies. Second, social equality in the Jacksonian period developed in relation to settler expansion, which guarded against the resurgence of feudal land title in the New World and ensured the priority of popular sovereignty over aristocratic systems of rule. The last phase unearths counter-narratives of democratic empire to reveal how colonial subjects challenged settler-colonial rule by reconfiguring antebellum notions of popular sovereignty. Through a conceptual-historical reconstruction of the relationship between settler expansion and American democracy, my project provides the basis for a decolonial theory of democracy that de-normalizes settler experiences as the unsurpassable horizon of democratic politics.
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    The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Capital and Migration In South Africa
    (2018-06) Huang, Mingwei
    In light of the People’s Republic of China’s reemergence on the African continent since 2000, my dissertation, The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Migration and Capital in South Africa, explores the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of contemporary Chinese migration and capital in South Africa from an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist and critical race studies. Based on the analysis of media and cultural texts, in-depth interviews, and extensive participant-observation fieldwork primarily sited at a “China Mall,” a wholesale shopping center for Chinese goods, and Chinatown in Johannesburg, my dissertation theorizes the “south-south” dynamics of the “Rise of China.” It argues that Chinese capital in South Africa is an emergent form of 21st century racial capitalism and empire that functions through neoliberal modes of flexibility, mobility, and risk-taking and the production of racial difference. My dissertation tells a novel story about aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs who chase economic ambitions unattainable to them in neoliberalizing China in the emerging markets for low-cost Chinese goods in South Africa and across Africa and Latin America, while reproducing the enduring social inequalities and power relations foundational to South Africa’s history of racial capitalism and colonialism. The dissertation chronicles not only transnational Chinese livelihoods in South Africa, but also the fraught intimate and non-intimate encounters between Chinese and Africans, and the experiences of precarious Southern Africans migrant workers at the mall. It emphasizes the multiplicity of economic forms, affective economies, socialities, and historical contingencies. A feminist ethnography of racial capitalism, it tracks practices of capital accumulation, transnational capital flows, and labor relations alongside the production of racial, gender, and sexual difference necessary for the maximization of profit. The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism theorizes contemporary processes of racialization and neoliberal global capitalism across seldom examined yet increasingly important south-south geographies, while engaging racial capitalism scholarship with often elided analysis of gender and sexuality.
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    Terrorist Threats: Dreaming Beyond the Violence of Anti-Muslim Racism
    (2020-07) Patel, Soham
    My dissertation draws on cultural and political theory as well as visual arts, literature, and music to examine how Western empire is constructed through Orientalist knowledge and also contested through decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist aesthetics. “Terrorist Threats” relies on a multidimensional approach to studying the Global War on Terror and its attendant figure targeted for death and destruction: the Muslim. Following the scholarship of Sherene H. Razack, Sohail Daulatzai, and Junaid Rana, I examine how the colonial construction of the Muslim as a racialized object within modernity, in particular, has been deployed to taxonomically classify a broad range of intersectional categories: Black, Brown, indigenous, immigrant, Latinx, Arab, Sikh, Hindu, and Islam. That is, the “Muslim” in the context of white supremacy and global imperialism exceeds the rigidity of a faith-based category. In fact, my project contends that the figure of the Muslim becomes a fungible category to signify a racialized object that philosophically and/or phenotypically embodies a political position other than liberal secular humanism. Thus, throughout my project, I explore how several South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists engage in insurgent cultural production to combat white supremacy. This allows me to interrogate how colonial knowledge, on the one hand, propagates anti-Muslim racism and, on the other hand, disciplines, controls, and compels the diaspora to internalize this knowledge as a way to perform the role of the good/desirable immigrant. Throughout “Terrorist Threats,” I highlight how South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists rethink and reshape Orientalist knowledge production and the role of Western secular ideas of self-determination, sovereignty, citizenship, and the Human within colonial modernity. The analysis offers a praxis of reading, seeing, and listening to visual and sonic archives that articulate decolonial knowledge and aesthetics, which becomes what I call “terrorist threats.” My project’s transnational focus seeks to produce decolonial imaginaries whereby different political solidarities and praxes can be forged — beyond and across geopolitical and biopolitical borders.