Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers. Nebolon identifies settler militarism’s inherent contradiction: It depends on life, labor, and land to reproduce itself, yet it avariciously consumes, via violent and extractive projects, those same lives and natural resources that it needs to subsist. From vaccination and blood bank programs to the administration of internment and prisoner-of-war camps, Nebolon reveals how settler militarism and racial liberal biopolitics operated together in the service of capitalism. Collectively, the social reproduction of these regimes created the conditions for the late-twentieth-century expansion of US military empire.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Settler Militarism, Racial Liberal Biopolitics, and Social Reproduction 1
1. “National Defense Is Based on Land”: Landscapes of Settler Militarism in Hawaiʻi 20
2. “Life Given Straight from the Heart”: Securing Body, Base, and Nation under Martial Law 47
3. “The First Line of Defense Is Our Home”: Settler Military Domesticity in World War II-Era Hawaiʻi 72
4. “A Citizenship Laboratory”: Education and Language Reform in the Wartime Classroom 103
5. Settler Military Camps: Internment and Prisoner of War Camps across the Pacific Islands 129
Conclusion: The Making of US Empire 155
Notes 163
Bibliography 217
Index 231