Up Against Erasure | Justin Jackson: “Occupying America: War and the Infrastructure of US Power in a Globalizing World”

Presented by Justin Jackson (History, University of Massachusetts Amherst). A CAS MillerCom event

The US government’s deployment of troops to Chicago, Minneapolis and other cities, ostensibly to assist federal enforcement of immigration law, has vividly displayed its militarized infrastructure for policing one of globalization’s effects: transnational labor migration. In fact, the military occupation’s long if strange career across US history, from the British occupation of Boston to recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suggests that occupying and globalizing have always been intertwined. Revolutionary-era Americans opposed occupation as tyranny. Yet the new United States almost immediately began resorting to military force and institutions to govern foreign and insurgent peoples, beginning with Native Americans, fugitives escaping slavery, and French and Spanish-speaking Americans. Despite its controversial politics, occupying became an indispensable technique of American power in a globalizing world, regulating growing flows of people, goods, and ideas that both weakened and strengthened US sovereignty at its peripheries. That occupying has come home to the North American heartland hints that the US government may be ever-more tempted to use the military to police and govern civilians and citizens as they confront rising crises of climate change, war, and mass migration.

Hosted by: Department of History 

In conjunction with: American Indian Studies Program, Arms Control, Domestic & International Security (ACDIS) Program, Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, Center for Global Studies, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, College of Law, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Department of African American Studies, Department of Anthropology, Department of Asian American Studies, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Department of Geography, Department of Latina/Latino Studies, Department of Sociology, Humanities Research Institute, School of Labor & Employment Relations