Empire, Nation, and Colonialism

Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies

Deborah Cohn
co-edited with Jon Smith
Duke University Press, 2004

Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States—including the legacies of a plantation economy and slave trade—are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South—both center and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony—complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America.

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The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us

Rasul Mowatt
Routledge, 2021

The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence exposes the spatial processes of racialising, gendering, and classifying populations through the encoded urban infrastructure – from highways cleaving neighbourhoods to laws and policies fortifying even more unbreachable boundaries. This synthesis of narrative and theory resurrects neglected episodes of state violence and reveals how the built environment continues to enable it today within a range of cities throughout the world. Examples and discussions pull from colonial pasts and presents, of old strategic settlements turned major modern cities in the United States and elsewhere that link to the physical and legal structures concentrating a populace into neighbourhoods that prep them for a lifetime of conscripted and carceral service to the State.

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Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa

Michelle Moyd
Ohio University Press, 2014

The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history. Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents. Violent Intermediaries situates them in their everyday household, community, military, and constabulary roles, as men who helped make colonialism in German East Africa.

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Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends

John Nieto-Phillips
University of New Mexico Press, 2005

Interpreting Spanish Colonialism offers a compelling examination of how historians in Spain and the Americas have come to understand and write about the Spanish colonial past and its meanings for national presents. Working from a transnational perspective, the book brings together scholars of Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The eight essays situate historians' writings within the context of their day, suggesting how "history" has - perhaps more often than not - responded to present-day needs, agendas, and expectations.

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Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
Schuessler Institute for Social Research
1022 E. 3rd St., Room 209,
Bloomington, IN 47405
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