In the Abusable Past’s latest installment of “What We’re Reading,” we invited Javier Arbona-Homar and Emily Mitchell-Eaton to discuss their recently released books. Taken together, Arbona-Homar’s Explosivity: Following What Remains(University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and Mitchell-Eaton’s New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) deftly trace the complex relationships between colonialism, mobility, and memory. In this wide-ranging conversation, they walk readers through how they came to their research, what it’s like to study empire in unlikely places, and how to think about the materiality of decolonial politics.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Javier Arbona-Homar: Emily, I devoured your invaluable book. Both of our books are, at the core, about what travels. They are broadly about mobilities. In your book, a policy travels, and in mine, remains move from place to place. Your book, New Destinations of Empire, is about the ways that lifeless words ratified in a compact of “free association” travel with people who enliven policy. In that in-between space, the Marshallese’s visa-free Compact of Free Association (COFA) status, a legal status that nominally allows them to travel and work in the U.S., is confusingly challenged, limited, and exploited – revealing, in your words, “the interrelation between empire and mobility and its effects on empire’s legally liminal subjects.” Why is Springdale, Arkansas, “of all places” (a popular expression you carefully dissect), a “new destination of empire” and what does Springdale reveal about long legacies of racialized mobilities?
Emily Mitchell-Eaton: Javier, thank you for this generous and generative opening! When I first came across Springdale as a destination for Marshallese migrants, like many, I was struck by its seeming unlikeliness as a place where Pacific Islanders would settle. I started to tug at this destination’s global connections and started to see all kinds of through-lines—many traced through mobilities of different sorts—that brought both Arkansas and the Marshall Islands into the center many imperial processes. While political geography has tended to reproduce a kind of core-periphery model, I became curious about what could be called a “periphery-periphery” approach, asking: what might happen when we center two places like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, two places perceived as remote—though, importantly, not by their own inhabitants—in our analysis of something as large-scale and as intimate as U.S. empire. What kinds of mobilities and connections might we be able to trace?
In New Destinations of Empire, I do this by following the Compact of Free Association (COFA), which in 1986 established the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ (RMI) formal independence from the U.S. and granted Marshallese citizens the right to migrate visa-free to the U.S. The book follows this policy and its beneficiaries from Majuro to Honolulu to D.C. to Springdale, Arkansas, which is now home to the largest Marshallese population outside of the Marshall Islands. When Marshall Islanders began arriving to Springdale, they encountered a racial landscape profoundly shaped by histories of racialized displacement, dispossession, and in-migration. Springdale is a site on the Trail of Tears, a former sundown town, a town shaped peripherally by Arkansas’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and a place massively transformed since the 1980s by Latinx and Marshallese migration, much of which came as a result of the poultry industry—Springdale is the world headquarters of Tyson Poultry and a “chicken town,” where many immigrants work in poultry factories. In other words, racialized mobilities, some forced, some coerced, some solicited, are central to the human and physical landscape of this town and the larger region.
Your own attention to mobilities in Explosivity: Following What Remains, is so dexterous and capacious without ever being heavy-handed—at times it’s detailed with such a light, lingering touch! I read it with what I can only call melancholic rapture. In it, you follow the traces of a set of explosions in San Francisco’s history, paying particular attention to the 1944 Port Chicago explosion and the violence of its immediate explosivity, the conditions that gave rise to it, and its extended aftermath, a long tail in either direction. I was enthralled by the various mobilities you follow, from exploded material to narratives about liability and culpability to the materials transiting the port to the memories of the striking Black sailors, the Port Chicago 50, whose refusal to return to a dangerous worksite laid bare the violence of explosivity under carceral and racialized conditions.
You describe your approach as a “decolonial method of following what remains” that “challenges…the everyday militarization of memory.” What, for you, makes ‘following what remains’ a decolonial method?
JAH: My book is based mostly on (and written from) the so-called San Francisco Bay Area, in its colonial toponym, and more specifically, drawing on the landscapes of five historical explosions in this region. But to get this experimental writing out of my system, I felt that I had to write it as a contribution to the language of—or for—decolonization. Explosivity, as a term (one that I borrow from volcanology), allows me to better understand the often-chaotic motion of volatile substances and the political power to ignite these in the specific landscapes where these forces come together. So, to put it bluntly, explosivity names an ongoing colonizing process. The book’s intro explains how explosivity helps to understand the interrelated dynamics of extraction, chemicalization, and war-making—with their conjoined, dire climate consequences. In that regard, I had to conceptualize a method that could serve to identify these often ignored—and sometimes seemingly disparate and contradictory—dynamics that together subjugate people and places.
In the book’s conclusion (spoiler alert), I connect the racially uneven exposure to explosivity to another historical moment: the explosion of the USS Maine in La Habana, Cuba, in 1898. The Maine explosion is thought of as igniting the mis-named Spanish American War—in reality, a global colonial expansion that combined weapons and media in new ways and continues to deeply shape a shared present day. I’m getting ahead of myself anticipating a bit here some new research that I’m doing into what remains of that war—those wars, plural. But the question is how to draw upon radical memory when explosivity destroys the conditions of its own making? Scholars decry the militarization of memory, which is not only evident but propagated through fixed places like museums, memorials, and monuments. But the work of so many activists, workers, and everyday narrators and artists challenges the fixity of landscape that locks-in nationalistic and eternal narratives of belonging. If explosions—and explosivity, more broadly—dissipate remains, chemicals, and particulates, in what ways could such a dispersed archive in motion counter the aggrandizing imperialist narratives of fixed places? Walking and moving with this dispersed archive is what the book proposes.
Precisely, what I admire and what resonates for me about New Destinations of Empire is your attention to landscapes, too. You mentioned “sundown towns,” and I made notes about these that I wanted to ask about. In your research, oral histories often narrate landscape features (posted threats of racial terror on signage, for example) that are no longer there. But the proven existence of the sign in the past is not the point of the narrators bringing this up; the point is to situate a geographical imagination of a racist town as something that is not here and not now; it’s enclosed and left in the past. Can you say more about how a landscape makes a “past” past?
EME: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about geographical imaginaries, or ways of imagining places, their meanings, and their relational significance to one another. While geographical imaginaries are never singular, they are often competing and structured by power. They also do important political work! For example, places imperial actors imagine as remote—like the Pacific Islands—can then be targeted for extractive or violent practices like nuclear testing. When such places are imagined as small and powerless, they can also be understood as lacking agency and as incapable of self-government, and thus in need of colonial tutelage. Similarly, contemporary geographical imaginaries about Springdale as simply racist (or, by contrast, immigrant-friendly) can elide complex histories of racial exclusion and conditional inclusion, shaping racialized migrants’ access to rights and safety. In other words, geographical imaginaries have material effects.
Your question—and so much of your book!—asks: how do we trace these material effects? If place-based narratives render certain racialized groups, or processes, or forms of violence absent from history, they are also attempting to absent it from the landscape but never without resistance and counterevidence to those narratives. Landscapes, including discursive landscapes, can also be haunted by immaterial ghosts—I’m thinking here of Springdale’s sundown town sign that no one could find a photograph of but which lingers persistently in local residents’ memory.
For me, this is a methodological question: how do we use slow methods to attune to everyday life, to study the everyday, small-scale histories and landscapes of large-scale processes like militarization and racial capitalism? I interviewed ‘regular folks’ in Springdale, asking them to think about big questions of race, empire, settler colonialism, citizenship, and militarization, but in ways that were calibrated to everyday life, articulated through ordinary, mundane narratives.
One of the things I loved most in your book were the rich descriptions of your embodied experiences of landscapes. You describe “sitting patiently to sense landscape poetics” and attunement, a “sensorial or bodily engagement or an embodied endurance of fieldwork.” You also talk about “political sensing” (or just “sensing,” as a shorthand), an approach that holds ample space for the felt experience and emotionality of places, including grief. Can you say a bit about how you experienced—or sensed—the Port Chicago memorial as both a landscape and as an articulation of a particular geographical imaginary?
JAH: Yes! That’s a great question and it’s not easy to answer! You alluded earlier to the explosive events at the Port Chicago port and naval magazine that blew up in 1944, killing a majority of Black munition loaders. The segregationist plantation-like conditions at Port Chicago and at a second segregated ammunition depot in the Bay Area at Mare Island led to widespread resistance that culminated in the Black sailors’ strike three weeks after the deadly explosion at barracks in Vallejo, across a channel from Mare Island. But the building of a federal memorial in the 1990s, later protected by the US Congress as a full unit of the national parks under the Obama administration, is a long and complicated story. Its very stability and protection, amidst ongoing wars, is a questionable condition I probe in that chapter.
Experiencing the many demands placed upon the Port Chicago memorial to hold different, competing meanings from within a space of alleged patriotism and unity, touching upon the horrors of war, all while at the same time the memorial is ensconced within an active logistics port for endless war, was a dizzying encounter. If the architecture of the memorial spatially offers comforting views of the water, the ruins of a dock, the list of names of the deceased, and the shrapnel of the ships, it also enforces grief and closure visually and sensorially, disconnected from the subsequent radical strike. I’ve spent more years than what I want to account on this challenging puzzle because the landscapes of Port Chicago go back to my doctoral dissertation, prior to the rest of the book.
The work of scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Derek Gregory, Mishuana Goeman, and Ashton Wesner helped me write this part. I had to somehow clarify for the reader that the space itself encodes different architectures than the prescribed visual monopoly that the memorial enforces: what to see and not see. While certain readings of place reduce land to a target—what else is a munitions port for if not to treat its destinations as targets?—I wanted to reveal that the memorial is fragile in its restrictive sense-making, despite solid appearances. Its instability draws attention to the ongoing forms of violence, imperialism, and hazardous chemistries loaded up there. “Freedom as a place,” from Gilmore, means remaking space with the evidence of oppression already there—not idealizations of what one wishes a site could reveal. But contradictory meanings in the site was something I found to be hard to write about, at first. Anyway, I also wanted to mention that it was important to underscore that a rich tradition of anti-war and anti-imperial protests at the gates and waters of this port—Vigil for Peace, the Peace Navy, Veterans for Peace—show how people have countered the completeness and finality of this military base many times before.
But this line of thinking reminds me that you have written about grief, attachments, and care, including in articles beyond your book. How do you attune to the politics of grief and grieving, particularly in how it becomes disciplined, allowed, restricted, or denied? I especially appreciated how you listen to narrators for the nuances of their vocabulary or how they express notions of repair or sometimes solidarity across ethnicities, but sometimes in ways that open up and simultaneously foreclose on freedom (freedom from toxicity, borders, and the burdens of citizenship status).
EME: The first of many things that comes to mind is that so many state structures that purport to provide reparations actually enforce closure—not emotional closure or healing, in the way we usually understand it, but closure in the sense of closing off, enclosing, foreclosing histories and their interpretations. So, legal reparations often accomplish the opposite of repair. As you’ve written so compellingly, memorials often serve the same function—to put a period on “history” and close off possible alternative interpretations of that history and limit the liability of the imperial state.
U.S. colonial and imperial history is rife with examples of this phenomenon. For example, Section 177 of the U.S.-RMI Compact of Free Association laid out terms for compensating the Marshallese victims of U.S. nuclear testing, restricting it to residents of the four atolls officially designated as “affected”: Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and Utrik. This is how colonial violence is baked into the very structure of the law: it limits the state’s liability by circumscribing reparations not only to a particular claimant group but also geographically and temporally, or, as the Nuclear Claims Tribunal put it, by “render[ing] final determination upon all claims past, present and future.” But it’s impossible to contain the radioactive effects of toxicity in space and time; they move across ocean currents, in animal and plant species, between proximate atolls, and through generations via genetic mutations caused by radiation and other more systemic health determinants.
For Marshall Islanders, as for so many across U.S. empire—Viequenses, for example, in Puerto Rico—finding any meaningful sense of closure, in the wake of devastating military testing and amidst ongoing conditions of ruination and intergenerational trauma, is simply not possible. (Jorge Rochet’s play, “Ni Una Bomba Más!”, explores these themes with incredible richness and complexity!) Yet while recent Marshallese history is so heavy with the grief of displacement and nuclear violence, I wanted to avoid telling a story where that grief was the driving force of the book’s narrative, partly because it didn’t feel like it was mine to tell and partly because that trauma narrative often overshadows equally important experiences of Marshallese joy, freedom-making, and creative world-building, often in solidarity with other immigrant and Indigenous communities.
I see our books as thinking carefully about citizenship—or perhaps, the spectrum of citizenship to non-citizenship—and attending to the ways that (non)citizenship contours exposure to risk as well as what can be considered an “accident,” aliability, or a responsibility (to reparations, to protection, etc.). Racialized citizenship even shapes the uneven right to unionize and strike, as you show in the Navy’s designation of the Black sailors’ strike as a “mutiny,” and can follow people into death. For instance, you write of the deceased Chinese workers often buried in common graves, or memorialized without names. We’re also, I think, both interested in the double-edged nature of peoples’ incorporation into legal rights and forms of citizenship, of “integration” (for example, for racialized military servicemen), and the gaps in, and costs of, that always-partial incorporation. Do you find citizenship a useful framework for understanding people’s lived experiences of explosivity under imperialism? What, for you, are the possibilities and limitations of that framework?
JAH: I especially appreciated your analysis of imperial citizenship—this is something I want to carry into my next book project—as “liminal, exceptional, and exclusionary.” Imperial citizenship produces vulnerabilities. Of course, imperial citizenship (also thinking “in Puerto Rican” here, as someone from San Juan myself) is co-constitutive with a routinized, normative citizenship. A hegemonic citizenship is usually unthought of in the everyday lives of its citizens; unquestioned, and presumably assured by a written constitution, with the “rights” it promises. But imperial citizenship calls back from the margins that sovereign power can be exercised against its “own” citizens, too. Occasionally one gets glimpses of this, such as the entire eviction of the majority-white town of Port Chicago in the late 60s, allegedly for safety (but likely transporting nuclear materials). Citizenship requires violent enforcement, ultimately.
But I don’t think that I pondered enough of a framework around citizenship in this first book. I do see a lot of possibilities there, however, especially thinking these days about the visual culture of citizenship and the presence of imperial debris to assert and claim sovereignty and sovereign space. You asked about the lived experience of explosivity, but I’m also thinking a lot about what happens after living. In death, imperial subjects appear, when necessary for empire, as names on a memorial, for example. The preservation of imperial victimhood appears everywhere in landscapes, although as scholars we tend to think of this empire as “hidden in plain sight.” But is it even hidden? Data shows well over 300 monuments in the U.S. that celebrate this imperialist war.
In short, empire appears in its ruins; its scattered debris, sculptures, remains, and monuments of 1898 are everywhere (but a scalar geographical analysis helps to better “see” these). Always besieged, one might say, but visibly hegemonic. Meanwhile, its subjects, documented and not, can disappear—and be disappeared—in life (but usefully reappear in death). There’s a lot to unpack and that’s what I plan to write about! What about you; what’s next, if you want to share?
EME: I’m in the early stages of a new project on decolonial futures and political horizons. I’m interested in the politics of time, thinking about how anticolonial movements imagine and articulate political futures, and how these imagined futures get linked to—or decoupled from—formal political status, political parties, and UN recognition. I’m also thinking about how liberatory visions for political transformation over time might diverge from neoliberal teleologies of progress and modernity. What might self-determination look like in the ostensibly post-colonial 21st century? How do questions of debt, tourism, land use, language politics, austerity and debt, environmental extraction and crisis, and reproductive justice—among many others—shape struggles for decolonization? While my work has largely focused on the U.S.-occupied Pacific, this year, during my sabbatical, I’ll explore these questions in the context of Puerto Rico, Greenland, Morocco and Western Sahara, and New Caledonia, places where the contemporary politics of decolonization are materializing in compelling ways.
In and across these places, I continue to be drawn to exploring the tensions between settler colonialism and migration. For example, I’ve just come back from Belfast, North(ern) Ireland, a place with a complex history of anticolonial struggle and a more recent upsurge of xenophobia. In June, there were anti-migrant riots in Ballymena following an attempted sexual assault of an Irish teenage girl by two Romanian-speaking migrants. These riots prompted pro-migrant rallies in Belfast and elicited comparisons to the forced displacement of Catholics during the Troubles. Similarly, recent ICE raids in Puerto Rico, particularly in Dominican neighborhoods, have generated massive protests and increasingly strident critiques of U.S. colonialism there—that is, people are drawing links between anti-immigrant policing and colonial violence. So I’m excited to continue exploring these dynamics in conversation with other scholars like you who are taking up similar questions!
AUTHOR BIOS
Javier Arbona-Homar is an associate professor (dual appointment) of American Studies and Design at the University of California, Davis.
Emily Mitchell-Eaton is an assistant professor of Geography at Colgate University.