ABOUT THIS BOOK

An ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism.

In Imperial Material, Alvita Akiboh reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. These symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of local power, their original intent transmogrified. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the imperial United States, whose presence announced itself on every bit of currency, every stamp, and the local flag.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alvita Akiboh is assistant professor of history at Yale University.

REVIEWS

“With crisp prose and a sweeping narrative arc, Akiboh offers an original, ambitious, and deeply researched work of scholarship. By focusing on the uses and meanings of US national symbols that were exported to the colonies—flags, stamps, and currency—Akiboh uncovers the quotidian practices that made real the experience of colonialism. These symbols were everyday reminders to colonial subjects that they were living under US rule. And they were never just symbols. As Akiboh compellingly demonstrates, they have been at ‘the center of debates about national identity, inclusion, and exclusion in the US colonial empire.’”

— Sarah Miller-Davenport, Columbia University

“This is terrific scholarship. Akiboh presents a highly original, impressively researched, clearly written, and helpfully illustrated study of the official accoutrements of US imperialism.”

— Bartholomew Sparrow, University of Texas at Austin

“Akiboh’s original and compelling story shows us that empire was as much a matter of stamps, money, and flags as it was about raw colonial domination—and that indeed the latter did not happen without the former. At once seminal and revelatory, this book covers uncharted territory in the historiography of American empire and of empire more broadly.”

— Julian Go, University of Chicago

“In this vividly written history, Akiboh traces ideas and artifacts in motion. Whether saluting the Stars and Stripes, raising a seditious flag, or marking political heroes on the stamps of the independent Philippines, colonized people throughout the Pacific made and remade the meanings of national symbols. Imperial Material boldly demonstrates that at stake in these contests was nothing less than life or death.”

— Christopher Capozzola, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Imperial Material is an important, innovative history that examines the crucial role of quotidian objects in effort to foster allegiance or loyalty. Akiboh shows how the imperial fetishization of flags, stamps, and currency reveals imperial insecurity about its reliance on the colonized for the imperial arrangement to work. In turn, the objects serve to foster pride in a newly decolonized nation. A major contribution to our understanding of the affective dimension of US empire.”

— Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures
A Note on Terminology: On Mainlands and Americans
Introduction: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire
1 What Followed the Flag
2 Pocket-Sized Imperialism
3 Symbolic Supremacy
4 The Object(s) of Occupation
5 Symbolic Decolonization
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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