Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Grateful Dead were perhaps the first to allow their fans (Deadheads) to make audio recordings (bootlegs) of their live shows and trade them with friends. This practice of trading music was an early predecessor of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trading, a revolutionary use of Internet technology with far-reaching social and economic implications. P2P is generally regarded as the cause of a pitched legal battle between the music industry and consumers, but it has become just another means by which Deadheads have extended their practice of permitted trading. This paper examines Deadhead bootleg trading as described on several fans’ websites. Bootleg trading highlights the interplay between media producers and consumers in negotiating the meaning of media products and the functioning of subcultures in the face of marginalization by the mainstream. In contrast to the recording industry’s efforts to label trading as “piracy,” bootlegging also highlights the social value of decentralized music distribution.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The 2004 British film Shaun of the Dead, while obviously fictional, reversed the trend of many British texts by displaying a domestic attack on British soils, rather than a colonial dominance abroad. This postcolonial analysis of the low-budget zombie film examines the impact of imperialism on contemporary British society and exposes how the typical literary heroism in imperial British narratives has eroded since the heyday of the Empire.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Why do certain traumatic memories become part of public memory while others are forgotten? In protesting a particularly vicious campaign in the town of Calendaria during the Philippine-American War in 1901, four Filipinas testified of rape and molestation by American soldiers. In total, seventy women of Calendaria complained of abuses, yet the commanding officer Captain Boughton discounted their testimonies. Though hardly isolated incidences, these war atrocities were virtually erased from Filipino and American public memory. The women of Calendaria decided not to testify, claiming that it was better “to let the dead bury the dead.” My project explores what it would mean to honor these women’s voices. Recovering these testimonies from official archives such as the military records of the Philippine-American War at the National Archive in Washington, D.C., this paper examines how the elision of sexual trauma and rape in the history of the Philippine-American War signals imperial trauma. Although feminist scholars such as Anne McClintock point out the connection between sexual trauma and war, such violence has not been explicitly investigated in the United States’ military conquest and the Philippine-American War specifically. This study debunks the image of the good old American soldier by showing how acts of American conquest and empire were tied to acts of violence against women.

In contrast to the elision of American war atrocities against women during the Philippine-American War, the sexual atrocities committed against Filipinas during World War II by Japanese soldiers elicited public outrage. Called “comfort women,” these women were held as slaves to be raped and tortured. Recently, these lolas or grandmothers have spoken out and demanded reparations from the Japanese government. Why has this trauma become part of public discourse while the raping of Filipina women by U.S. soldiers remains nearly invisible? This paper analyzes both layers of trauma, how the prevalence of Japanese war atrocities in collective memory serves as a touchstone for earlier war crimes during the Philippine-American War. Examining the story of the Japanese war atrocities in Cecilia Brainard’s novel When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, I argue that the war crimes against women during the Philippine-American War haunt the narrative of World War II atrocities, and that the figure of the Japanese soldier stands in for the American soldier. My reading shows how imperial trauma shapes collective and cultural memory through historical layering. By juxtaposing women’s testimonies of Philippine-American war atrocities next to Brainard’s novel, my project interrogates the construction of the archive while simultaneously contesting imperial trauma.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper offers a contribution to the wider project of rereading classical strategy against classical strategy by turning from the phenomenologist of war, Clausewitz, to the phenomenologist of politics, Hannah Arendt. In particular, Arendt’s account of how late nineteenth century imperialism set off socio-military processes in the direction of total war in Europe enables us to rethink some of the foundational assumptions of classical strategy in a way Clausewitz cannot. Outside the civilized confines of Europe, Clausewitz considered the world to be in a constant state of war; he regarded primitive peoples as having an especially war-like spirit. Civilized war depended on the distinction between war and peace; it ended with the clear victory of one side over the other after a large-scale battle. As a result, civilized and savage wars were kept in separate boxes in nineteenth century military thought.

Hannah Arendt, in contrast, is an important forerunner of emerging efforts to read the post-colonial into strategic and security studies. Her ground-breaking work on the links between colonial war and total war in Europe in Origins of Totalitarianism has been central to all subsequent historical accounts. To date, the association, and the constitutive relationship between war in the North and South, has been rejected by classical strategy and military history. Following Clausewitz, this literature prefers to keep ‘small wars’ and conventional European war in separate boxes. Accordingly, Arendt provides an important corrective to this and a number of other conceptual and historical flaws of both strategic and international studies. Reading Arendt this way also contributes to filling a gap in the vast secondary literature on her work. There is no systematic account of Arendt’s writing on the war question and there are very few treatments of her thinking on imperialism. The few that have been attentive to the latter dimension of Arendt’s work misread her intentions and the subtlety of her thought.