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Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung (review)

2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jaas.2024.a926987

1097-2129

Linh Thủy Nguyễen,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung Linh Thủy Nguyễen (bio) Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State, by Moon-Ho Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 368 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0520397873. Menace to Empire is inspired by a seemingly simple question: Why did immigration laws target both Asians and radicals as enemies of the state? What results [End Page 117] is a vast, impressive work of deep archival research that traces transpacific anticolonial movements and challenges to US empire alongside colonial violence from the Philippine-American War to World War II. Focusing on the transpacific reach of imperial projects and decolonial movements, Moon-Ho Jung decenters the United States, turning our focus to the transnational networks forged to perpetuate (for example, the United States in collaboration with, at various times, the British and Japanese Empires) and challenge white supremacy and imperialisms. Bringing empire to the study of national security, Jung emphasizes that the United States is an empire and the US national security state was developed to expand and justify transpacific racial and state violence, turning acts of "imperial sovereignty into acts of national defense" (56). The book's introduction, six chapters, and conclusion intervene in contemporary discussions of anti-Asian racism to tell a complex story of the "anti-radical origins of anti-Asian racism," evidenced by the simultaneous passage of reactionary sedition laws and restrictionist immigration policies. Jung challenges the idea of the United States as a nation of immigration and inclusion, and reveals how anticolonial and anti-capitalist radicals in the Pacific strategically moved across national borders, demanding independence and challenging immigration, sedition, and labor laws. Jung comprises his archive by reading for prominent figures and their overlapping encounters in decolonial and anti-capitalist movements from the Philippines, Hawai'i, South Asia, Japan, and the Pacific Coast of the United States, in the "masculinist settings of migrant labor and radical organizing" (6). Jung makes efforts to attend to the limitations of state and military archival sources and their analyses of the gendered effects of empire by including women such as Agnes Smedley and Salud Algabre, and by noting Partido Komunista ng Pipilinas' (PKP) recruitment of women and examining the discourse of patriarchal nationalism. The primarily male radicals detailed in this work, including Isobelo de los Reyes, Har Dayal, Benigno Ramos, Sadaichi Kenmotsu, and many others, provide ample examples of the cross-border and international movements of those menaces to empire as they confront and evade the imperial reach of surveillance, shattering the myth of one-way migration driven by the so-called American dream. Jung's work reveals the seeming tautologies of violent repression that simultaneously conjured and stoked revolutionary responses, messy alliances, and strategic ideological appropriation. The project of extending US empire fueled the "anticolonial rage" it was intended to crush, as the state's vilification of activists as anarchists and Communists drove them to the revolutionary ideologies they were accused of endorsing (8). Liberation ideologies were racialized to justify violence as "US officials increasingly came to see struggles for national liberation (sedition), social revolution (anarchism and socialism), and Japanese imperialism (pan-Asian solidarity) as one and the same" (103). [End Page 118] Chapter 1 traces the development of infrastructures of surveillance and intelligence across the Pacific, and how they came to shape the US strategy of pacification via counterinsurgency against insurrectos in the Philippines. Chapter 2 emphasizes the significance of pan-Asianism as the frame through which the United States and Filipinxs projected and imagined their political projects. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the near constant evocation of the threat of the Japanese Empire shaped US anxieties and views of the Filipinx anticolonial movement, as evidenced by the racial narrative of national security. Chapter 3 examines the Ghadar party and South Asian revolutionaries on the Pacific Coast of the United States, showing how sedition and immigration laws converged to remove racialized security threats. In chapter 4 the security state brings crushing repression to laborers in response to the 1920 labor strike in Hawai'i. Owners...