Speaker:Wesley Attewell
Assistant Professor of Pol itical Geography at the University of Hong Kong
Speaker:
Wesley Attewell
Assistant Professor of Pol
itical Geography at the University of Hong Kong
Talk title:
The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in t
he Decolonizing Pacific
"1\,000\,000 Army R@R Free ride to Hawaii all expenses paid wife s
ays 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.
In recent years\, geographers have shown h
ow logistics has long been essential to the everyday work of racial capital
ism\, settler colonialism\, and empire. It is by now well documented how mo
dern logistics emerged in the post-World War II moment as a bundle of innov
ative methods for managing the globalizing spaces of capitalist production\
, distribution\, and consumption. This talk grounds the logistics revolutio
n in a different archive: the bloody history of Western empire building acr
oss the decolonizing world.
"5 Apr 69 - Combined Easter Sunday Aloha BKV at 1301 Akamai St. Ka
ilua 50 with Roland Laboguen & Henry Parrilla". Photograph\, VA049830. 05 A
pril 1969\, Benedicto K. Villaverde Collection\, Vietnam Center and Sam Joh
nson Vietnam Archive\, Texas Tech UniversityI focus on the Vietnam War as a key inflection point in the US empire-state’s turn towards logisti cs as an organizing framework for overseas intervention. I offer the concep t of just-in-time imperialism to explain how wartime innovations i n the everyday work of circulating commodities and people across borders an d oceans unleashed new transpacific entanglements of racial capitalism\, la bor migration\, and counterinsurgent violence. The resulting supply chains were\, to paraphrase Deborah Cowen\, “infrastructures of empire and resista nce.” In addition to supplying soldiers with the raw materials of violence\ , they also ensured the social reproduction of imperial lifeworlds across t he war zone. But as the archival record shows\, US imperial dreams of “keep ing inventory in motion” grated against the stubborn centrality of racializ ed and gendered labour to the functioning of imperial supply and c are chains. By thinking relationally across different forms of Vietnam War logistics\, I will tease out a series of contradictions – circulation and r eproduction\, 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 geogr aphy\, American studies\, and Asian diaspora studies to map the transnation al geographies of US empire building from the Cold War into the present. Hi s first book\, The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterins urgency in Afghanistan\, was recently published by the University of M innesota Press. He is currently working on a second manuscript\, which is t itled The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Paci fic.
This is hybrid event hosted in Geog 229 and on zoom.
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