Research
Trained as a cultural and historical geographer, I research transnational natural resource governance, the geopolitics of racial liberalism, and the longue durée of U.S. national security. I focus on the 20th century development and transformation of U.S. liberal-democratic institutions framed by “ecological” crisis and natural resource misuse, and how such contemporary methodologies for U.S. social and political practice re-entrench historic entanglements of U.S. racial slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism.
Verdant Empire:
Race and Rural Economies of Containment
My first book project, Verdant Empire: Race and Rural Economies of Containment, begins with the United States’ Cold War-era anxiety that civil unrest across the Third World threatened international public order and property relations. This anxiety grounded U.S. policymakers’ fixation on agricultural productivity and global hunger, and drove the surge in U.S. interventions into Third World economies via capital- intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer programs under the U.S. Department of State’s Technical Cooperation Administration. Announcing this international agricultural and rural technical assistance agenda while asserting the ostensibly disinterested motivations behind it, President Harry S. Truman stated in his January 20, 1949 inaugural address that “the old imperialism… has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing.” Verdant Empire situates such provisional catalysts for and justifications of U.S. intervention within the longue durée of U.S. efforts to secure settler colonial, imperial, and racial capitalist modes of accumulation through high-modernist innovations in natural resource governance established under nominally anti-racist and anti-imperial terms of inclusion. Beginning with the advent of such efforts, it analyzes the early- to mid-20th century administrative and policy archive of U.S. agricultural and rural development programs within the United States and across the Third World. It does so with a key segment of the archive of the emerging social science disciplines: the contemporaneous academic and philanthropic field research programs and reports that aimed to discern the root causes of Black and Indigenous dispossession and unrest, and to guide comprehensive reforms of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and public administration. Joining both archives, Verdant Empire offers a robust relational and genealogical critique of the settler colonial, imperial, and racial capitalist repertoires of high-modernist, transnational natural resource governance and liberal-democratic statecraft.
Verdant Empire is the first book-length project to situate the Point 4 Program and broader Cold War-era agricultural and rural development agenda as part of the decades-long reconstitution of Black and Indigenous peoples’ liberatory struggles within, beyond, and against the U.S. nation-state into new economies of dispossession, extraction, and exploitation through nominally anti-racist and anti-imperial reforms of U.S. national and transnational natural resource policy and public administration. It does so by tracing how, between the 1920s and 1950s, such programs, in conjunction with the emerging social science disciplines, helped recast through the market the welfare of Native peoples under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, rural Black people in the U.S. South, and émigrés and Indigenous peoples in the independent West African republic of Liberia, and helped reframe U.S. national and international affairs as principally economic. Verdant Empire argues that these technical assistance programs and social scientific research efforts did so by conceptualizing and delimiting the reservation economy and plantation economy as provincial and outmoded natural resource economies that reproduced Black and Indigenous dispossession and unrest as a fact of such economies’ supposed distance from modern capitalist relations, rather than engines of capitalist growth and exploitation. In doing so, they not only reconstituted Native peoples’, Afro-diasporic peoples’, and West African peoples’ differential political and historical coordinates into commensurate objects of U.S. state intervention. Under such liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion, they also helped fashion the U.S. national economy and international economic affairs as a self-evident organization of interaction and exchange, and thus an effective technology of U.S. settler colonial and imperial counter-sovereignty.
Verdant Empire is the first book-length project to situate the Point 4 Program and broader Cold War-era agricultural and rural development agenda as part of the decades-long reconstitution of Black and Indigenous peoples’ liberatory struggles within, beyond, and against the U.S. nation-state into new economies of dispossession, extraction, and exploitation through nominally anti-racist and anti-imperial reforms of U.S. national and transnational natural resource policy and public administration. It does so by tracing how, between the 1920s and 1950s, such programs, in conjunction with the emerging social science disciplines, helped recast through the market the welfare of Native peoples under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, rural Black people in the U.S. South, and émigrés and Indigenous peoples in the independent West African republic of Liberia, and helped reframe U.S. national and international affairs as principally economic. Verdant Empire argues that these technical assistance programs and social scientific research efforts did so by conceptualizing and delimiting the reservation economy and plantation economy as provincial and outmoded natural resource economies that reproduced Black and Indigenous dispossession and unrest as a fact of such economies’ supposed distance from modern capitalist relations, rather than engines of capitalist growth and exploitation. In doing so, they not only reconstituted Native peoples’, Afro-diasporic peoples’, and West African peoples’ differential political and historical coordinates into commensurate objects of U.S. state intervention. Under such liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion, they also helped fashion the U.S. national economy and international economic affairs as a self-evident organization of interaction and exchange, and thus an effective technology of U.S. settler colonial and imperial counter-sovereignty.
Eco-Fascist Itineraries:
Climate Change and the State of Empire
My second book project, Eco-Fascist Itineraries: Climate Change and the State of Empire, turns to 21st-century U.S. authoritarianism, militarism, and differential racialization under climate change and the anticipated rise of climate-induced displaced persons. It begins with two contemporaneous dynamics: First, resistance to redistributive state-led climate mitigation and adaptation efforts that has articulated with a racialized anti-communism and with White settler “blood and soil” claims to place; and second, anxieties over an impending surge of climate-induced displaced persons that have articulated with current repertoires of criminalization and militarization. Eco-Fascist Itineraries queries the entangled cultural and legal construction and regulation of migrants, refugees, and Native peoples amidst each dynamic. It does so via textual analysis of recent U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and security-oriented “think tank” documents with contextual analysis of “informal” sites of militarization—from recent armed confrontations between land-owners and federal agents to border militias set against “migrant caravans.” By focusing on militarized anxieties vis-à-vis race, place, and migration under climate change, this project puts Transnational American Studies scholarship on relational racialization and imperial repertoires of U.S. political economy in conversation with Critical Refugee Studies scholarship that re-conceptualizes the refugee from an object of rescue to a site of social and political critique.
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