Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.
Professor Nebolon will discuss this work with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Jodi Kim, and Momo Djebli in a conversation moderated by Christina Heatherton. A reception will follow.
Accessibility
Wheelchair accessible
Free and open to the public
About the Speakers
Momo Djebli is a senior majoring in American Studies and Human Rights. They serve on student government as the Vice President of Multicultural Affairs and as one of the co-managers in the Office of Student Leadership and Engagement’s Programming Board. They also are a student worker at the QRC. Momo is an aspiring academic and scholar of race, gender, sexuality, empire and the law. They hope to pursue graduate study to grow as an interdisciplinary scholar and thinker.
Jodi Kim is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her research traverses the interdisciplinary humanities and is broadly concerned with the intersections of colonial and imperial formations, militarism, racial capitalism, and gendered racial violence. She is the author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2022); Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Co-Editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016).
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) is a scholar of indigeneity, race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and decolonization who situates her work in Native American and Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and anarchist studies. She is Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies, Professor of Anthropology in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Kauanui is the author of two monographs: Hawaiian Blood (DUP 2008) and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty (DUP 2018). She also has an edited book titled, Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (UMP 2018). Kauanui co-edits a book series with Jean M. O’Brien called “Critical Indigeneities” for the University of North Carolina Press, and recently guest-edited a special issue of NAIS focused on “Enduring Palestine: Critical Interventions” (forthcoming in spring 2025). Kauanui’s next book (in-progress) is provisionally titled “A Question of Decolonization: Hawaiian Nationalism and the Politics of Feminism.” She is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (founded in 2008).
Juliet Nebolon (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Her research and teaching bring a transnational perspective to the study of race, indigeneity, and gender in the United States, with a particular focus on U.S. war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Her first book is Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of US Empire (Duke UP, 2024).
Christina Heatherton (she/her) is Associate Professor of American Studies and Everett and Joanne Elting Associate Professor for Human Rights and Global Citizenship at Trinity College. She also serves as Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute. She is the author most recently of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (UC Press, 2022).
This salon is cosponsored by the Trinity Social Justice Institute, the American Studies Program at Trinity College, and the Smart Cities Research Lab.
