Review: Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific, by Simeon Man

Lifetimes of Punishment: The Imperial Feedback Loop of Anti‐Asian Violence

“…The political economy of disinvestment in the “hyperghetto” curtails life opportunities so that spaces of community for young men with little prospects are often conditioned by violence (i.e., gang membership, the military) or precarious labor. The military conscripting displaced people and sending them to do the bidding of the U.S. empire through the conscious forgetting of past interventions (see Man 2018; Vang 2021) is another example of the imperial feedback loop and the nexus between military, prison, and border violence.…”

Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific

“…4 It is one particularly gruesome historical example of American militarist incursion and destruction in the transpacific that demonstrates the lie of the United States as a benevolent "savior" and protector of the Philippines. 5 Typhoon Yolanda and other extreme weather events attributable to global warming are exacting immense devastation and loss of life in the Philippines, largely in consequence of the Western world's fossil fuel-burning war technologies that exploit and destroy the environment. From the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, the West's innovations in weaponry for military dominance in the transpacific were contingent on maintaining control of the fossil fuel-based capitalist economy.…”

“…According to Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson in their landmark volume Queer Ecologies, the undertaking of queer ecologies is "to probe the intersections of sex and nature with an eye to developing a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world" (5). Indigenous Pacific Islander and Asian diasporic writers and artists who identify as LGBTQ and who incorporate a queer ecological imagination in their work not only express in varying degrees a decolonial perspective that is grounded in a deeper relation to the land, to the ocean, and to the more-than-human natural world but also articulate this perspective by bringing into focus intersections of sex and nature in ways that disrupt binaries of human and nonhuman relations that have been implemented and maintained through histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the inequities of an unsustainable empire.…”

“…In The Disinherited, Ong turns his sardonic critical gaze on the slums of Manila and the millions of desperate poor, some of whom are Indigenous people dispossessed of their tribal lands, 5 who live in these densely populated urban areas. Undoubtedly, Manila's slums and the subjugation of poor and Indigenous people in the novel can be understood in Rosaldo's and Stoler's terms as the rot that remains from imperialist incursions and continuing modes of colonialism in the Philippines.…”

“…In Manila, it was apparent that to attain freedom you had to have a shitload of money. (4)(5) As this beginning part of the novel suggests, the Caraceras both signify and preserve their aristocracy as a status that must be publicly performed-a spectacle of wealth that must be enacted-for the poor to consume, with the intended outcome of their accommodating and internalizing oppression and subjugation. Moreover, note the past conditional in this quote: "It was as if for them a hero long missed and much needed, had finally returned and they were pouring out all the energies and hopes accumulated during a lifetime of waiting. "…”