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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nCover of Jodi Kim\u2019s Settler Garrison. Debt, Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n (Duke University Press, 2022)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim\u2019s book opens with a wonderful analysis of the Oscar-winning South Korean movie Parasite<\/em> as paralleling her work\u2019s central concerns. Though the film is often understood by American audiences as simply a black comedy concerning South Korea\u2019s class dynamics, Kim promotes a deeper understanding of the film\u2019s symbolism as a critique of U.S. debt imperialism in one transpacific nation, in which Seoul is revealed as \u201cthe capital city of what is effectively a militarized US neocolony\u201d (p. 2). Subsequent chapters of Settler Garrison<\/em> analyze transpacific spacial and temporal exemptions in which US occupation denies a county\u2019s full sovereignty without offering US federal jurisdiction and statehood, with US presence in a territory creating a dominating metapolitical authority supplanting local autonomy and subjugating indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In territories across the pacific, the US is both liberator and coercer, as Kim observes in chapters concerning spacial and temporal exemptions such as the military base\/camptown, the POW camp, and Guam. Importantly, these exemptions involve both spacial and temporal structures and processes. The abstract social institutions and concrete sites all connect through land seizure and subsequent US metapolitical authority across the pacific, territory that US policy has conceptualized as an \u201cAmerican lake.\u201d In such areas, Kim finds that the US creates rules for others that it, conveniently, does not apply to itself. The current world order is based on strategic holdings, which must be reproduced through both military and extra-military dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ongoing military occupation, legal domination, and debt assignment, though, require continual shoring up. Neocolonialism requires obfuscating the fancy footwork required to normalize it, and Kim goes on to carefully analyze cultural productions that \u201cdefamiliarize and estrange this naturalization by linking the land seizures of US settler colonialism to those of military empire\u201d (p. 21). Subsequent chapters in Kim\u2019s book analyze a wealth of creative, indigenously-rooted cultural texts that expose and critique such domination so as to imagine different, better futures. The range of Kim\u2019s cultural studies of creative works includes documentaries, short stories, novels, poetry, and stage productions. In them, she finds critical assessments of the various forms that neocolonial domination takes, including forms such as sexual exploitation, psychological warfare, and forced migration. Her analysis of such texts and their interconnected affinities allows Kim to find hope beyond current conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For those uninitiated in the academic jargon of settler colonialism, Settler Garrison<\/em> is dense. Though only 188 pages of text (not including notes), the writing, especially in the Introduction, can require considerable unpacking. Regularly referencing a rich and diverse range of scholarship, Kim aims for an academic audience. Lay readers should keep Google handy for the at times dizzying array of concepts. For those willing to commit, though, Settler Garrison<\/em> provides a deep and interconnected understanding of the mechanisms underlying US hegemony in the transpacific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review for UM CHGS May 6, 2025 As academic interest in settler colonialism has increased, so have innovative studies. In her most recent book, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Jodi Kim (Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth) takes on the topics of military and transpacific history, imperial conquest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96689],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-filmbook"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4312,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions\/4312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}