The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

Kaplan, Amy

doi:10.2307/j.ctv1pdrpt2

Cited by 281 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Also haunting the US suburban home are the irrefutably violent legacies of empire, industrialization, and warfare: the removal of Native Americans from their lands; the enslavement of Africans over hundreds of years; and the ethos of "manifest destiny" that supports white supremacy, American exceptionalism, and settler-colonial ideologies. Amy Kaplan (2002) has argued that notions of domesticity were "intimately entwined" with the expansionist discourse of manifest destiny in nineteenth century North America, expressed and policed through contrasting spatial metaphors of separate spheres. In the period preceding the US Civil War, when Native American land was occupied and stolen at increasingly rapid rates, the home became represented as a "bounded and rigidly ordered interior space as opposed to the boundless and undifferentiated space of an infinitely expanding frontier" (Kaplan 2002, 25).…”

Section: House Beautifulmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

Kaplan

2023

Catalyst

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The uneven, sometimes violent relationship between “here” and “elsewhere” is evoked powerfully in Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home—two linked sets of photomontages that engage the gender and racial politics of domesticity in the US as well as the geopolitics of empire. Troubling mythologies of warfare and documentary realism with dazzling wit and critical fury, these works refer materially and specifically to places and times of war in solidarity with protest movements while also raising questions of historical linkages and political accountability. Suturing their times and spaces into discontinuous contact, the two series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with conventional femininity, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare--to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. Across the long arc of the wars waged by the US from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler has shown us how the modernist aestheticization of US domesticity in the affluent post-World War II era promised personal empowerment and hopeful futures yet, emerging from warfare itself, only brought about more war.

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Section: House Beautifulmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

Kaplan

2023

Catalyst

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“…Various scholars have provided evidence that the Supreme Court created the unincorporated territory status because the justices and US policy makers feared that past territorial precedents could require the majority nonwhite populations of Puerto Rico and the Philippines to be fully included into the United States (Kaplan 2002;Kramer 2006;McCoy 2009;Erman 2019, 39-42, 51;McCann and Lovell 2020, 35-6. A few influential works on the Insular Cases include Burnett and Marshall (2001), Kaplan (2002), Sparrow (2006), Roman (2006Roman ( , 2010, Ramos (2007), Torruella (2007, Neuman (2009), Raustilia (2009, and Neuman and Brown-Nagin (2015).…”

Section: Western Colonialism and Imperialism In Guam And The Insular ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular Constitutionalism in the US Empire: The Legal History of US Citizenship in Guam

Dardani¹

2023

Law Soc. Inq.

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This article presents a legal history of US citizenship in Guam. I argue that members of Guam’s Congress mobilizing for US citizenship in the 1930s and in the immediate aftermath of World War II offer a powerful and instructive example of popular constitutionalism, or the interactive, extrajudicial process that generates constitutional meaning. Guamanians made constitutional claims to US naval leaders and lawmakers, arguing that colonized people living in the US empire should be US citizens despite ambiguous Supreme Court precedents in the Insular Cases, congressional inaction, and naval obstruction. Guamanians interpreted the Constitution in a way that pressured and influenced naval leaders to support and US lawmakers to ultimately enact legislation that extended citizenship to Guam. This legal history demonstrates the complexity of popular constitutionalism within the context of US empire. By claiming that they should be considered US citizens after the United States formally annexed Guam after the Spanish-American War, Guamanians drew on the Constitution to demand equality, dignity, and full inclusion in the US polity for colonized people. US naval leaders and lawmakers turned this egalitarian reading of the Constitution to their own strategic advantage, however, deploying it as a valuable piece of Cold War propaganda. This article thus provides a useful example of the ideological indeterminacy of popular constitutionalism. The Constitution can be interpreted by marginalized populations to demand equality and inclusion. But the Constitution can also be interpreted by the military and congressional leaders of a global empire to maintain systems of power, oppression, and subordination.

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“…Du Bois routinely distinguished between political democracy (i.e., democracy in government) and industrial democracy (i.e., the economic realm). In tying labor and capital together in a cross‐class alliance fixed within the nation‐state, imperialism domesticated democracy by confining it to both the national realm of politics and preventing its movement to both a wider world scale and into the economic realm of popular control over industry (Kaplan, 2002, 171–212). The dividends of empire drove white labor to remain in union with capital within the nation‐state and refuse a transnational class alliance with colonized labor, which would have mounted a more formidable challenge to the power of capital over industry.…”

Section: Fabianism and The Global Color Linementioning

confidence: 99%

“Unusual returns”: Transnational whiteness and the dividends of empire

Dahl

2022

Constellations

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struction in America, has received canonical status in contemporary theories of racial capitalism. 1 These "wages of whiteness," in David Roediger's (2007) incisive phrase, generated forms of psycho-affective compensation that positioned white laborers above black labor yet helped industrial capitalists artificially suppress wages, amplifying the extraction of surplus value from the working classes. As Nikhil Pal Singh puts it, the concept of racial capitalism is not simply an assertion about the racial origins of capitalism, but pertains to how "racial differentiation is intrinsic to productive processes of capitalist value creation and financial speculation" (Singh, 2016, 30-31; Douglas, 2019, 10-12;Robinson, 2000). Through the psychological wage, Du Bois captured how the production of racial difference enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in the United States by dividing the white and black working classes, with capital value production hinging on racial value production (i.e., the production of racial difference). In connecting the production of racial and economic value, he refused "the idea of a 'pure' capitalism external to, or extrinsic from, the racial formation of collectivities and populations" (Lowe, 2015, 150;Knox, 2016). Racial differentiation is not a separate process from capital accumulation, but a primary mode by which the commodity form of value is produced and ongoing relations of production are reproduced.Following but also departing from recent calls to move "beyond the psychological wage" (Myers, 2019), this essay explores how Du Bois used distinctive metaphors of value production derived from discourses of financial capitalism such as dividends, shares, and returns on investment to illustrate the economic, affective, and political benefits that accrue to white workers from their position in the racialized division of labor marking global capitalism. To capture the homology between racial value production and capital value production, he referred to the "income-bearing value of

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The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

Cited by 281 publications

References 0 publications

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

Popular Constitutionalism in the US Empire: The Legal History of US Citizenship in Guam

“Unusual returns”: Transnational whiteness and the dividends of empire

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