Thinking About Colonialism

 Back in law school, I read an article about transnational companies exploiting Third World countries and then moving out after draining what they could. That was when I was 25 years old. It made me think of how General Motors treated Anderson, Indiana.

As I see it, the Midwest is a colony. Yes, the whole of America could be said to be this – the Eastern Seaboard colonized by the English; Florida and the Southwest colonized by the Spanish; Alaska ruled by the Russians; and the French having bits and pieces of the interior. Southerners and Easterners colonized the Midwest. My Livingston ancestors were here while Indians remained in the northern part of the state.

Those early colonizers were overtaken by out-of-state corporate interests. United Steel founded Gary. GM staked out Anderson, Muncie, and Marion. Chrysler had New Castle. GM and Chrysler shared Kokomo. GM was also found in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Lafayette. Ford had a plant in Indianapolis. The Balls came out of state to Muncie. There may be other examples, too.

All of this led me to read Whose Homeland? Whose Security?, and then to this question: whose land do I live on now?

Among Jung’s subjects of study, radicalism quickly gave way to different declensions. For instance, although the Ilocano writer Isabelo de los Reyes burst into the Philippine intelligentsia with radical creativity—and was imprisoned in Spain for his work—he was a swift collaborator with the US. Across the Pacific, the writer Carlos Bulosan might have been an avid socialist and activist, but in the private sphere he was a known womanizer. The anticolonial visions of these thinkers wedge open other futures beyond those ascribed by colonial occupation and imperial forms of national independence. For Jung, the US can be framed potently as an empire in reaction, on the defensive, and anxious about its own sovereignty. At the heart of these anxieties are the revolutionary visions of freedom and decolonization, a liberation of colonized people’s own making.

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Therefore, challenging the xenophobias of security infrastructures must go beyond the lines of citizenship and belonging. These challenges must commit to returning land to the rightful stewards—in the Americas, Oceania, and Asia—who have long called these places home.

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