Settler Garrison

“Settler Garrison is a stunning, magisterial work that provides an entirely original definition of US empire as predicated on the production of its legitimation to wield power. Jodi Kim frames spaces heretofore deemed anomalous or marginal—the camptown, the POW camp, and the unincorporated territory—as the very sites where US empire establishes its authority to rule. In the process of redefining and reframing US empire, Kim offers a unique and sorely needed relational methodology for understanding the connection between its various modes, in particular between military empire and settler colonialism." - Grace Kyungwon Hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

“In this ambitious and brilliantly executed book, Jodi Kim offers a crucial bridge between frameworks of Anglo settler colonialism in North America and US settler military imperialism across the Pacific. Drawing connections that are breathtaking in their scope and historical comprehensiveness, she outlines the double standard in which the United States can indefinitely roll over its debts while demanding tribute for a military presence that protects freedoms that remain unrealized. I learned tremendously from this book.” - Iyko Day, author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism

"Building on an impressive array of work from cultural theorists, historians, literary critics, and others, Kim adds new ways to consider the devastating impact of the postwar US empire and the various responses to it through the paradigm of debt." - Edward Tang, American Literary History

"An ambitious undertaking. . . . Settler Garrison is a powerful antidote to conceptions of the Pacific as merely a US mare nostrum." - Jim Glassman, Pacific Affairs

"That Settler Garrison is a study of many things (e.g., capitalism, decolonization, militarism, settler colonialism, and sexual violence) should draw scholars from an extensive range of disciplines to examine this question alongside her and consider it in their own work." - Sarah Meiners, Journal of American Ethnic History

"This book is a worthwhile read for those who are interested in further understanding the mechanisms of exported US imperialism and in search of articulations of transpacific futurities. . . . Settler Garrison maintains a strong argument surrounding the operations of US militarism and a thoughtful commitment to transpacific futurities as envisioned by the people who have endured this violence and its settler imperial failures." - Katherine Funes, Modern Fiction Studies

"It makes a major contribution to the remapping of the spatiality and temporality of the US empire and the underlying neoliberal structures of debt and dependency that form national subjectivity." - Bob Johnson, Journal of American Culture