Formations of United States Colonialism ed. by Alyosha Goldstein (review)

THIS GROUNDBREAKING COLLECTION facilitates a critical conversation between U.S. settler colonialism in North America and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and Caribbean. The authors in this book disrupt the idea that internal and external imperial processes are discrete, instead highlighting the consolidation of the U.S. nation-state and overseas territorial expansion as contingent and overlapping, at times varied and contradictory, but always mutually constitutive. As editor Alyosha Goldstein elaborates, this volume does not simply compare and contrast U.S. colonialism at different sites, but posits an assertion that “analyzing U.S. colonialism demands understanding U.S. empire and the imperial nation-state as itself a comparative project and mode of power” (1).

Disciplinarily diverse and covering a wide historical range from the late nineteenth century to the present, the anthology is organized into three thematic sections. The first section, “Histories in Contention,” wrestles with history’s colonial constructions, complicating notions of evidentiary claims, archives, scientific empiricism, and juridical precedent. Joanne Barker’s opening essay highlights the theoretical implications of this collection, by showing how the subjectivity created by colonial modernity has undermined the Delaware Tribe’s self-determination, both in origin stories and in federal recognition. Other essays in this section include Berenika Byszewski’s study of settler colonial imaginaries mapped onto the Southwest’s Chaco Canyon, Manu Vimalassery’s examination of Chinese and Paiute interaction rendered through settler rumors, and the failure of U.S. legal remedies for the occupation of Hawai‘i, analyzed by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui.

The second section of the volume, “Colonial Entanglements,” expands and complicates the framework of colonial encounter with essays that examine enmeshed interactions under systems of colonial dispossession, enslavement, and racial capitalism. This section most directly places Native and Indigenous studies in conversation with critical and comparative ethnic studies, including Barbara Krauthamer’s essay on the exchanges between missionaries, Black slaves, and Indian slaveholders, and Lorena Oropeza’s essay on the construction of the “Indo-Hispanic” within New Mexican land grant struggles. Augusto Espiritu provides a comparative study of Puerto Rican, Filipino, and Cuban antinationalism articulated through hispanism, and Fa’anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa highlights football in American Samoa as the latest iteration of American empire through modernist development. Readers familiar with the literature on Asian settler colonialism will appreciate Dean Itsuji Saranillio’s study of Kēpaniwai Park on Maui, showing how the park’s multicultural pluralist narrative conceals and facilitates the ongoing violence from the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and concomitant environmental devastation.

The essays in the final section, “Politics of Transposition,” refute the normative logics rendered by imperial and colonial epistemologies. Included are Julian Aguon’s assessment of international law’s inability to incorporate Chamorro worldviews, Lanny Thompson on the biopolitics of the imperial cartography of Puerto Rico, Jennifer Nez Denetdale’s Native feminist reading of Lynda Lovejoy’s candidacy for president of the Navajo Nation, and Vicente Rafael’s investigation of translation as a civilizing order that extends from U.S. national formation to the War on Terror. In all, this diverse collection of thirteen essays succeeds in the aim to interrogate and connect examples of U.S. colonial processes and logics, and Goldstein’s organization of the anthology resists progressive linearity, instead highlighting productive juxtapositions without flattening uneven and incommensurate associations.

This volume makes several key contributions to the study of empire and colonialism, especially in regard to Indigeneity and U.S. exceptionalism. The authors underscore the centrality of Indigeneity, both the dispossession of Indigenous peoples that undergirds empire and the critical importance of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies to decolonization. By insisting that studies of empire must always explicate the disavowal of Indigeneity, the authors challenge U.S. exceptionalism, arguing instead that violence rendered through settler colonialism and imperialism is not aberrational to American democracy but foundational. Cumulatively, this cohort of authors consistently exposes the excesses and failures of U.S. colonialism, whether in the contradictions of legal claims, the unintelligibility of translation, the liminal status of “unincorporated territories,” or the Indigenous...