Both Wendy Brown and Mark Levinson are interested in theorizing and thinking through the meanings of the present. Both of them are struck by what they identify as unprecedented shifts — Brown by the turn toward what she identifies as neoliberalism, and Levinson by the ways that the container has revolutionized global trade. What is each arguing? And what do you think about their convictions about the uniqueness of the present?

Edwin Martini’s edited collection, Proving Grounds, examines the environmental history of U.S. military bases both at home and abroad. How does the environmental history approach of the authors help you think about U.S. diplomatic relations and/or foreign policy in new ways? Is it useful, do you think, to consider non-human animals and objects as historical figures with agency? Were any of the pieces particularly striking to you? Choose at least two to engage.

Mark Bradley and Amira Jarmakani are both interested in culture as a lens for thinking through how Americans understand US global engagement. They are also both interested in how those US global engagements shape American culture. What do you find interesting about their arguments and approaches?

Bevan Sewell and Maria Ryan argue that their focus on US foreign policy in areas deemed “beyond Washington’s core interests” helps to expose a far larger variation in US foreign policy that both scholars and American popular memory have ignored. Did their collection change how you think about and assess US global engagements? If so, how? Choose two pieces to use as examples of how your thinking has (or hasn’t) changed.

NOTE: I uploaded the entire eBook onto the Dropbox, but I have assigned the following chapters: Introduction, Chapters 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, and 14.

Both authors here are interested in the Cold War and decolonization. Kwak discusses aid and advisement, while Hardy discusses coups and interventions, but both examine in how the interests of U.S. capital shaped the United States’ global engagements. Both authors are also interested in the ways that U.S. Cold War engagements were affected by local circumstances. What observations do you have about how these two pieces fit together, complement each other, or offer quite different contributions to this discussion?

Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick explore three themes as they relate to “the body in the nation.” They also argue that “the body is an especially contested site for national definition.” These authors focus on ideas about bodies and their relationships to nations. They link these debates to discussions of international relations as well as global migrations of people and cultures. What do yo think about their approach? Choose at least two articles to discuss in your response.

Both authors provide granular detail about how US companies and the United States government managed their relationships with farmers, workers, and border regions. Their close observations give us more access to the details of these negotiations and thus to the ways that non-elites engaged US companies and the US government. How does each authors’ methodological approach shape their conclusions?

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Both McCoy and Poblete are interested in the understanding the dynamics that shaped American colonial terrains after the wars of 1898 helped establish U.S. rule outside of continental North America. The Supreme Court cases of the early twentieth century, collectively called the “Insular Cases,” established a new political definition for U.S. territory — spaces that would not ultimately become states, and whose residents were U.S. “wards,” but not U.S. citizens.

Each author is asking a different set of questions and using a different approach. Both are interested in how the colonial state and colonial political economies operated. But, Poblete is a social historian who examines the experiences of Puerto Rican and Filipino workers in Hawai’i, McCoy is more interested in political institutions and the ideologies and terrains they helped to produce. Reading these texts together, what new ideas about U.S. colonial rule/colonial practices did you encounter?

Writ large, both of these authors are interested in how elite white Americans engaged with places outside the borders of the US in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Hoganson explores how wealthy and middle class women understood foreign places as sites for acquisition and consumption of household goods and other commodities. American elites had other aims in the Dominican Republic, from providing substantial investment for “modernization” to forcibly taking over its finances and occupying the country. How might you compare these different global engagements?

In some ways these two pieces are very different. Smith is attuned to the experiences of non-elites. She is interested in exploring how they come to be subject to the powerful ideological regimes that she examines and explores how they fight against multiple forms of inequality. Greenberg, conversely, is clear that she is interested in dominant cultural ideas about how gender operated more than she is in exploring gender or race as a lived experience. How do these different approaches produce different kinds of analyses? How are their treatments of race and gender in the mid-nineteenth century both similar and different?

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