Overview

Reveals fundamental continuities between the contemporary War on Terror and earlier U.S. imperial conflicts Prehistories of the War on Terror examines the longstanding American project of classifying enemies who challenge U.S. power abroad as terrorists. To do so, the volume brings disparate episodes of U.S. military empire-building into dialogue across time and space. From settler colonial wars in the nineteenth-century American West to twentieth-century wars of conquest in Asia and the Pacific, the collection’s essays argue that the United States has drawn both materially and ideologically on older systems of empire in the conflicts through which it has waged the present-day War on Terror. Attending to the local histories from which these conflicts emerged and examining the effects of U.S. intervention in these sites, contributors analyze the cultural frameworks for understanding and remembering past conflicts that confirm, challenge, or refigure the logics of the War on Terror. This volume reveals how contestations over sovereignty, extraction, and inequality must be suppressed and flattened in public discourse to maintain a coherent vision of a totalizing War on Terror. Together, the contributors illustrate that there was no single road that led to 9/11 or the War on Terror. Rather, they argue that we must follow multiple paths into the past to fully understand our present and to fight for a more just future. Contributors: Moustafa Bayoumi, Joo Ok Kim, Janne Lahti, A. J. Yumi Lee, Naveed Mansoori, Karen R. Miller, Kalyan Nadiminti, Tim Roberts, Colleen Woods.

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9781512825169

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Reviews

"""Prehistories of the War on Terror shatters US exceptionalism with devastating historical specificity. With its stunning temporal, geographic, and disciplinary range of essays, this collection urgently demonstrates that any search for historical origins of US imperial violence implicates our political present."" * Monica Kim, University of Wisconsin, Madison * ""This vital, urgent, and absorbing collection of essays demands that we attend to the longer genealogy of imperial violence emanating from Washington, DC. From the decimation of the Apache nation to wars on the Korean Peninsula and the Philippines archipelago, the contributors to this book trace the histories of today’s forever wars."" * Laleh Khalili, University of Exeter *"

Author Information

A. J. Yumi Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. Karen R. Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.

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