Disarming Empire: Race and Anti-War Critique in US Cold War Weapons Culture

I am currently at work on my first book, a cultural and historical analysis of Cold War weapons development in the United States as it is shaped by race and war in Asia. It analyzes the culture of weaponry and its contestations across military and government reports, scientists’ writings, UN proceedings, war crime tribunals, radical anti-war newsletters, movement pamphlets, and activist and artistic cultural production. This project shows that weapons create as much as they destroy; they are complex systems of knowledge production that not only kill, but construct ideas of who should be killed and what forms of killing are justifiable. At the same time, since World War II a rich body of anti-war critique has emerged in opposition to weapons development—from the Black radical tradition, the Asian American movement, the Third World Liberation Front and nuclear diasarmament campaigns to contemporary technologists, students, feminists, and other activists struggling for a free Palestine. Disarming Empire draws inspiration from this anti-war tradition to offer an abolitionist critique of weapons culture that strives not for weapons control nor regulation, but for demilitarization, decolonization, and the dissolution of US empire.

Other Projects

I am currently working on three separate writing projects apart from my book manuscript. The first is an article on the Cold War legacy of international schools, focusing specifically on Taipei American School and legacies of U.S. militarism in Taiwan. The second is a co-authored essay with Heidi Amin-Hong, examining U.S. national and Vietnamese diasporic memory work that both memorializes and unsettles histories of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia in the wake of war’s ecological devastation. The third is a special section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience titled “Racial Matters of Asian/America,” co-edited with Natalia Duong.