This history reveals how radical threats to the United States
empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the
antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism.
Menace
to Empire transforms
familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious
history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the
anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific
between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung
argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out
of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the
Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond.
Jung
examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific
confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored
and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of
pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by
their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US
security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics
that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart
and soul of the US empire ever since.