Geography Colloquium Series – Wesley Attewell

Speaker:
Wesley Attewell
Assistant Professor of Political Geography at the University of Hong Kong

Talk title:
The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Pacific

“1,000,000 Army R@R Free ride to Hawaii all expenses paid wife says no thank’s found another man DASPO redid story after we spent two weeks following this poor SOB. 1969 Delta checking rice boat the 1,000,000 R&R sorty”. Photograph, VA027269. No Date, Ted Acheson Collection, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.

Talk Abstract:
In recent years, geographers have shown how logistics has long been essential to the everyday work of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. It is by now well documented how modern logistics emerged in the post-World War II moment as a bundle of innovative methods for managing the globalizing spaces of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption. This talk grounds the logistics revolution in a different archive: the bloody history of Western empire building across the decolonizing world.

“5 Apr 69 – Combined Easter Sunday Aloha BKV at 1301 Akamai St. Kailua 50 with Roland Laboguen & Henry Parrilla”. Photograph, VA049830. 05 April 1969, Benedicto K. Villaverde Collection, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University

I focus on the Vietnam War as a key inflection point in the US empire-state’s turn towards logistics as an organizing framework for overseas intervention. I offer the concept of just-in-time imperialism to explain how wartime innovations in the everyday work of circulating commodities and people across borders and oceans unleashed new transpacific entanglements of racial capitalism, labor migration, and counterinsurgent violence. The resulting supply chains were, to paraphrase Deborah Cowen, “infrastructures of empire and resistance.” In addition to supplying soldiers with the raw materials of violence, they also ensured the social reproduction of imperial lifeworlds across the war zone. But as the archival record shows, US imperial dreams of “keeping inventory in motion” grated against the stubborn centrality of racialized and gendered labour to the functioning of imperial supply and care chains. By thinking relationally across different forms of Vietnam War logistics, I will tease out a series of contradictions – circulation and reproduction, extraction and resistance, violence and care – that came to define this double-life of just-in-time imperialism across the decolonizing Pacific.

Speaker Bio:

Wesley Attewell is an Assistant Professor of Political Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He works at the intersection of human geography, American studies, and Asian diaspora studies to map the transnational geographies of US empire building from the Cold War into the present. His first book, The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is currently working on a second manuscript, which is titled The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Pacific.

This is hybrid event hosted in Geog 229 and on zoom.