In Settler Garrison Jodi Kim theorizes how the United States extends its sovereignty across Asia and the Pacific in the post-World War II era through a militarist settler imperialism that is leveraged on debt as a manifold economic and cultural relation undergirded by asymmetries of power. Kim demonstrates that despite being the largest debtor nation in the world, the United States positions itself as an imperial creditor that imposes financial and affective indebtedness alongside a disciplinary payback temporality even as it evades repayment of its own debts. This debt imperialism is violently reproduced in juridically ambiguous spaces Kim calls the “settler garrison”: a colonial archipelago of distinct yet linked military camptowns, bases, POW camps, and unincorporated territories situated across the Pacific from South Korea to Okinawa to Guam. Kim reveals this process through an analysis of how a wide array of transpacific cultural productions creates antimilitarist and decolonial imaginaries that diagnose US militarist settler imperialism while envisioning alternatives to it.

Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside; coeditor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, also published by Duke University Press; and author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War.

Introduction. US Exceptionalisms, Metapolitical Authority, and the Aesthetics of Settler Imperial Failure  1
1. Perverse Temporalities: Primitive Accumulation and the Settler Colonial Foundations of Debt Imperialism  39
2. The Military Base and Camptown: Seizing Land "by Bulldozer and Bayonet" and the Transpacific Masculinist Compact  62
3. The POW Camp: Waging Psychological Warfare and a New Settler Frontier  113
4. The Unincorporated Territory: Constituting Indefinite Deferral and "No Page Is Ever Terra Nullius"  138
Epilogue. Climate Change, Climate Debt, Climate Imperialism  174
Acknowledgments  185
Notes  189
Bibliography  229
Index  249