Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics ...

41 Social Text 135 • Vol. 36, No. 2 • June 2018

DOI 10.1215/01642472-4362349 © 2018 Duke University Press

This essay offers an investigation of US settler colonialism and military empire, a conjunction theorized as settler modernity, in the post– World War II era. It argues that settler modernity is an ensemble of relations significantly structured and continually reproduced through manifold regimes, relations, and forms of debt, and in particular through debt imperialism. Debt imperialism, as the essay elaborates, is a kind of tem-poral exception. It is a multiscalar process through which the United States imposes imperial power by rolling over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conforming to the homogeneous time of repayment that it imposes on others. This linking of debt and imperialism, indeed the ability to leverage great indebtedness into a form of imperialism, demon-strates how debt can function in such manifold and counterintuitive ways because it is not simply a financial economy. It is also crucially a figurative economy or narrative structure. The debt relation thus indexes something much broader than the sum of money owed. Indeed, it is a broader social relation, production of subjectivity, sleight of hand, and creation of a tem-poral exception through which US settler modernity functions and con-tinually attempts to re-create itself. In this varied relation, debt curiously emerges in two seemingly antonymous forms: as a form of imperialism, on the one hand, and as a form of freedom, emancipation, or liberation, on the other.

I focus on Asia and the Pacific as a crucial site where we witness a violent and specifically militarized convergence of these arrangements in the post– World War II conjuncture, when the US settler state also

Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise

Jodi Kim

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becomes a military empire. Transpacific connections within Asia, the Pacific, and the United States, the making of multiple Asian and Pacific Islander diasporas, subimperial dynamics and desires among Asian and Pacific regions and nations, and decolonial aspirations among the peo-ples of colonized territories are all animated by what might be called a colonial and gendered racial transpacific debt relation and militarism. I ask, moreover, how debt functions as a necropolitical regime for those impoverished, gendered racial, and colonized nations and subjects whose promissory notes must be fully repaid with interest. How has US settler modernity been constituted by this usurious necropolitics of the promise, even as it continually confers upon itself the temporal exception of debt imperialism, or the right not to keep its promises or even to evade the very need to promise? This analysis reveals that what is at stake in US settler modernity is not only the elision of conquest and genocide as the condi-tions of possibility for military empire, economic power, and the avowed defense of liberal democracy but also the attempt to possess metapolitical authority. Metapolitical authority, as distinct from mere political author-ity, is the ability to define and prescribe the very content and scope of “law” and “politics.”1

In invoking Asia and the Pacific as a site, it is not my intent to flatten the vast and complex heterogeneities and hierarchies within it, nor is it my intent to reproduce limitations in the frameworks of American stud-ies, Asian American studies, Asian Pacific American studies, and Asian studies that are not sufficiently attentive to work in Native Pacific and Indigenous studies. Rather, my intent and hope are to interrogate the very production of the Asia- Pacific by the United States as a site of strategic interest. This geopolitical and geohistorical production calls for a rela-tional analysis of distinct yet related forms of colonial domination — settler colonialism and military empire in particular — rather than a focus on one form that tends to elide the other. The United States as the literal testing ground for biopolitical tactics and technologies that are geopolitically and militarily projected abroad has produced and continues to produce Native displacement and dispossession, and that geopolitical and military projec-tion abroad in Asia and the Pacific in turn produces Asian and Indigenous Pacific Islander migration. Indeed, as Jodi A. Byrd asks, “Given all these difficulties, how might we place the arrivals of peoples through choice and by force into historical relationship with indigenous peoples and theorize those arrivals in ways that are legible but still attuned to the conditions of settler colonialism?”2 In theorizing, then, the nexus of US settler colonial-ism and military empire in Asia and the Pacific as settler modernity, I also amplify Alyosha Goldstein’s contention that focusing exclusively on impe-rialism and empire can risk obscuring how territorial seizure, occupation, and expansion, differential modes of governance, and their attendant jus-


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tifications remain the conditions of possibility for more indirect forms of rule, the vast network of military encampments, and global economies.3

Moreover, this essay understands settler colonialism and military empire as an ensemble of relations that continually need to re-create and renovate themselves, for they are incomplete and unexhausted projects.4 Indeed, the continual violence generated by settler colonialism and mili-tary empire is a mark or index of their very incompletion, as are the soli-darities, oppositions, and continued survivals of communities and peoples against whom (and often ostensibly on behalf of whom) such violence is waged. I build on Patrick Wolfe’s important conceptualization of set-tler colonialism as a “logic of elimination” whose dominant feature is the acquisition of land (via the elimination of the Indigenous population and its replacement with the settler population) rather than the surplus value derived from mixing native labor with land. As such, for Wolfe, settler colonialism is a structure and not an event.5 Yet, insofar as settler colo-nialism is not a fait accompli but, rather, a process that requires continual renewal and renovation, I comprehend it as both a structure and an event. I link it, moreover, to military empire, observing how the United States is at once a settler state and an imperial power whose militarist logics condense in a particularly heightened form specifically in Asia and the Pacific. Yet still, as Iyko Day and others have importantly argued, we need to go beyond a binary theory of settler colonialism structured around a settler- Indigenous dialectic. Day maps out “the triangulation of Native, alien, and settler positions” in North America with an attentiveness to how divergent conditions of both forced and voluntary migration are sig-nificant features of US settler colonialism.6

Alongside such important work, my concern is to apprehend the nexus of settler colonialism and the orders and outposts of military empire in Asia and the Pacific. The Obama administration’s decision to “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia- Pacific, revealed in then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s October 2011 policy plan, called “America’s Pacific Century,” gives renewed vigor to an already protracted history of violence. In this plan, the Asia- Pacific is identified as the most crucial sphere of US influence in the twenty- first century and the region where US military resources will be concentrated. The economic arm of this military pivot, the Trans- Pacific Partnership, has been called the NAFTA for the Pacific, or “NAFTA on steroids.”7 More recently, President Trump’s August 2017 comment that the United States would meet North Korea with “fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before” in response to North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un’s missile and nuclear program, and Kim’s threat in turn that North Korea would launch mis-siles at the US territory of Guam in the Pacific, have further heightened militarized tensions in the region.8



By way of a brief contextualization, I begin the story of debt impe-rialism, or US settler modernity’s temporal exception, with a few flash-points in the history of the US relationship to debt and militarism and in the history of capitalism as analyzed by Karl Marx in his discussion of “primitive accumulation.” First, the constellation of the strategic lever-aging of debt, public debt, and militarism emerges at the very founding of the “United States of America,” especially in terms of the concerns about the tremendous debt incurred by the War of Independence.9 To speak about this founding, or the transformation of the thirteen Brit-ish colonies in the New World into the nation- state of the United States through a revolutionary war, is to speak about the breakaway of thirteen white settler colonies from the metropole, which would then constitute themselves into a settler state and then later also a military empire and metropole of their own. Thus, while the United States might be formally “postcolonial” vis- à- vis Britain, the singular focus on this postcoloniality obscures continuing US settler colonialism vis- à- vis Native and Indig-enous groups. It also obscures the relationship between settler colonial-ism in the territory that eventually became “incorporated” as the fifty United States of America and the discontiguous territories, unincorporated territories, military bases and attendant camptowns, and neocolonized regions in Asia and the Pacific that constitute the proliferating orders and outposts of US military empire. Indeed, even before the formation of the United States, in what K- Sue Park calls the “contact economy” of the pre- independence colonial era, “the English expropriated indigenous lands for the American real estate market. . . . Indigenous debt created through colonial lending practices, often predatory in nature, enabled the seizure of indigenous land. Land therefore became a money equivalent not through positive sale, but through debt and loss; foreclosure was a tool of indigenous dispossession.”10

This constellation of debt, public debt, and the waging of war con-tinues through the US Civil War. A notable instance is the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution in 1868, one of the Reconstruction amendments passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. This amendment holds juridical significance because it extended citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States regardless of race, and guaranteed due process of law as well as equal protection of the laws. Citizenship, due process, and equal protec-tion have come to be the hallmarks of US liberal democracy and political modernity. This constitution of the rights- bearing subject is spelled out in section 1 of the amendment. Yet the rote familiarity of the key terms of this section has come to overshadow what is named in the other sections of the amendment. I draw attention to sections 2 and 4 and query how these lesser- known sections of the reified Fourteenth Amendment reveal the



very contradictions that make possible citizenship, due process, and equal protection. Section 2 reads as follows: “Representatives shall be appor-tioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” Here, we are told that “Indians not taxed” are excluded from the head count of proportional representation because of the nation- to- nation relationship between the US government and Native American tribes. Itself an amendment to Article 1, section 2, of the Constitution, this section retains the original Indian exclusion but does away with the three- fifths compromise.

And now, section 4:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.11

In this section, we are told that the US government is obliged to pay its debts unless such debt is incurred “in aid of rebellion or insurrection against the United States” or because of “any claim for the loss or eman-cipation of any slave.” Following the Civil War, this section served the double function of relieving the US government of having to pay back Confederate war debt and of having to pay Confederate states for the value of their emancipated slaves.

Taken together, these sections of the Fourteenth Amendment dis-play at once the apotheosis of liberal democracy and its contradictory and violent conditions of possibility. The “exclusion of Indians not taxed” named in section 2 cannot but reveal the US Constitution as the docu-ment of a white settler state whose frontiers would continue to expand far beyond its mid- nineteenth- century borders. Section 4 names the racial chattel slavery that, conjoined with settler colonialism, provided the labor and land in the consolidation of an ever- expanding United States. In this conjunction, I note the appearance of the figure of debt, particularly US government debt. I offer this discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment as an early instantiation of how the United States would continue to deploy and manipulate debt, as at once a literal and figurative economy, an arith-metic and grammar, in brokering its power as both a settler colonial and an imperial state.

If in the Fourteenth Amendment public debt functions as a narra-tive of transition in the political and economic maturation of the United States, we find a parallel narrative of transition in Marx. He writes that



primitive accumulation forms the prehistory of capital, and in his classic case of England, this took the form of enclosure, or the expropriation of the agricultural producer or peasant from the land. Yet elsewhere in the world, “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of cap-italist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”12 In other words, settler colonialism, franchise colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade constitute for Marx the prehis-tory of capitalism rather than what Cedric Robinson would describe as the history of racial capitalism.13

What is particularly interesting, however, in Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation is the appearance of public debt and the US Civil War. He writes, “The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital. . . . The national debt has given rise to joint- stock com-panies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock- exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.”14 In terms of the US Civil War, he observes that it “has brought in its train a colossal national debt and, with it, a heavy tax- burden, the creation of a finance aristocracy of the vilest type, and the granting of immense tracts of public land to speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, etc.”15 So even as Marx crafts a schematic narrative of transition from the prehistory of capital to its proper history, by focusing specifically on public debt, he complicates the political and economic teleology that the Fourteenth Amendment juridically formal-izes. Political enfranchisement granted in section 1 of the amendment is attenuated and contradicted by the growth of finance capitalism resulting from section 4’s recognition of the validity of public debt. His reference, moreover, to the “granting of immense tracts of public land” for capitalist speculation lays bare how section 2’s naming of “Indians not taxed” inad-vertently serves as an archive of the settler colonial abrogation of Native American sovereignty and treaty rights in the theft of Native land and the transformation of that land into property.

Even as Marx is clearly invested in charting a teleological history of capital, his invocation of public debt generates an interrogation of that presumably linear trajectory. Indeed, we have witnessed how primitive accumulation in the form of national debt has given rise to speculative enterprises of all kinds. Primitive accumulation has multiple, overlapping, and still enduring temporalities. It is thus neither simply the prehistory


47 Social Text 135 • June 2018Kim · The Necropolitics of the Promise

of capital nor an anachronistic or belated practice appearing in the his-tory of capital, which is to say that overt state and extrastate violence is an enduring and constitutive feature of the capital relation. Indeed, Marx’s analysis in Capital has met with debate and critique across a range of critical traditions, significantly because his analysis would imply that primitive accumulation is a discrete historical stage, a prehistory drip-ping in blood, that will be succeeded by the general law of capital accu-mulation in which extraeconomic force and violence will be replaced by the “silent compulsion of economic relations.”16 Rosa Luxemburg, in an important reformulation, viewed primitive accumulation not as an already completed historical stage but as a lens through which to apprehend impe-rialism and imperial violence as continuing and constitutive features in capitalist expansion.17 Along with Luxemburg, we might think of primi-tive accumulation as the concept that helps make visible the violent pro-cess (as opposed to historical stage) of not only imperial capitalism but also settler colonialism, franchise colonialism, racial chattel slavery, and gendered racial labor exploitation, or the very ground that continues to make possible capital accumulation. If anything, as postcolonial Marxists and others have noted, rather than a historical transition from extraeco-nomic violence to “silent compulsion,” there has been a continual spatial displacement of such violence to the imperial periphery.18 David Har-vey calls one important aspect of primitive accumulation, privatization, “accumulation by dispossession,” arguing that it is peculiar to call such an ongoing and persistent process “primitive” or “original.”19 Feminist and Indigenous studies scholars, such as Sylvia Federici and Glen Coulthard, respectively, have also provided important critiques, demonstrating how shifting the central subject of analysis from the waged male proletariat to women or the colonial relation makes visible how primitive accumula-tion is a necessary and ongoing condition of capitalism rather than its precondition.20

For the purposes of my analysis of US settler modernity and debt imperialism, Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation is helpful not only because of the appearance of public debt and the US Civil War but also because of what it might reveal about dispossession, land, and temporality in the context of the settler colonial and imperialist United States. In a use-ful analysis disaggregating the four elements of primitive accumulation — dispossession, proletarianization, market formation, and the separation of agriculture and industry — Robert Nichols focuses on Marx’s influential phrasing “theft of land” in explaining dispossession, noting that to speak of dispossession is to “indicate something of the ways in which capitalism disrupts or disturbs our orientation in space, our place- based relations.”21 Although Marx analyzed dispossession in Capital as a way of explaining proletarianization, Nichols contends that it can be recast as a distinct



category of violent transformation not conjoined to processes of prole-tarianization and market formation. This ultimately yields the conclusion that “dispossession comes to name a distinct logic of capitalist develop-ment grounded in the appropriation and monopolization of the produc-tive powers of the natural world in a manner that orders (but does not directly determine) social pathologies related to dislocation, class strati-fication and/or exploitation, while simultaneously converting the planet into a homogenous and universal means of production. Moreover . . . we can properly view it as a process that is constitutive and contemporary.”22

I would like to build on this insight by noting that dispossession not only names a “distinct logic of capitalist development” ordering class stratification but also names the colonial, imperial, and racial dynamics that are conjoined with capitalism and through which capitalism often dispossesses and exploits. Moreover, the relationship to land that capital-ism disrupts is a specifically European one and does not account for other relationalities, in particular, Indigenous ones. Yet still, the spatial com-ponent, the conversion of “the planet into a homogenous and universal means of production,” also has an attendant temporal component. Just as heterogeneous spaces are violently incorporated into the logic of capital, heterogeneous conceptualizations and inhabitations of time are homog-enized into what I have called the homogeneous time of repayment, and this homogeneous time operates in tandem with the temporal exception of debt imperialism that does not have to conform to it. Whereas Fordism and Taylorism in the early twentieth century were concerned with homog-enizing time as related to workflow and labor efficiency within the capital-ist mode of production, the homogeneous time of repayment is related to but not reducible to this.

Since the mid- nineteenth century, national debt has played a vital role in the predatory practice of the nexus of capital and the settler state. The “enchanter’s wand” through which the national debt begets specula-tive capital has more recently been endowed with an even greater magic. The Fourteenth Amendment recognizes and validates the public debt, and recent debates about the “debt ceiling” attempted to make urgent the question of the US government’s ability to pay back its loans. Still, the United States is the greatest debtor nation in the world, and thus far its debt has been rolled over indefinitely.23 This is the story of how the United States rigged the game of world finance in 1971. It is the story of debt as imperialism, or what economist Michael Hudson calls superimpe-rialism.24 The United States exercises debt imperialism by virtue of, and not despite of, its status as the greatest debtor in the world. How has the United States been able to convert indebtedness, a position of weakness, into a position of relative strength and, indeed, into the very basis of the world’s monetary and financial system?25 Significant elements in the cruel



magic of this alchemy are gold and paper. In 1971, Nixon floated the dol-lar, depegging it from the gold standard. Since then, the United States has become the world’s greatest debtor and has reached a level of indebtedness without world- historical precedent. The United States replaced the gold standard with a transformed US Treasury Bill, a government- issued debt, as an international monetary standard. Essentially, what this has meant since the early 1970s is that foreign banks with a surplus of dollars can no longer exchange them for gold. Rather, the banks must purchase US Trea-sury Bonds, meaning US Treasury debt, thereby extending a continuous loan to the United States. This, counterintuitively, is an important source of US imperial power, an effective debt imperialism through which the US keeps itself afloat by inflating its capital markets and generating growing levels of budget deficits via foreign capital investment. It is a debt appar-ently without ceiling, precisely because the loan that the world continues to extend to the United States has become an integral, structural feature of the world economy. That is, US hegemony is significantly leveraged via a debt that is rolled over indefinitely and does not have to be repaid. How can a global superpower also be a global superdebtor? As Giovanni Arrighi and others have asked, how, in other words, can the United States have hegemony without hegemoney?26 Given the central role of US global finance in the world economy, a US default on its massive debt would radically destabilize the architecture of racial capitalism. The specter of such a destabilization and attendant fears of apocalyptic risk are in effect exploited as a form of US imperial domination. Put simply, the US nation- state is too big to fail. As such, one significant feature of US settler moder-nity is debt imperialism, or the creation of a temporal exception through which the United States is able to roll over its debt indefinitely. The United States does not need to conform to the homogeneous time of repayment even as it imposes that standard temporality on other populations and nations, and even as those who have been subjected to US military and imperial intervention are structurally positioned within a financial and affective economy of an indebtedness that is perpetual. The threat or actual use of institutional violence (via, for example, effective unilateral veto power in formally multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and the threat of military retaliation compel the world to submit to the rigged rules of the game. This is a kind of metapolitical authority, or the authority not only to apply or enforce laws, as well as discipline and punish when necessary, but also to define the very contours of what constitutes law and political authority as such.

US debt imperialism is the economic logic and form of US mili-tarism and military empire, one that is heavily concentrated, as I have observed, in Asia and the Pacific. This loan that the world is continu-ally compelled to extend to the United States is in many ways a form of



tribute or, more accurately, a protection racket in recent decades. Debt imperialism is at once the literal cost and effect of military empire. US debt has been significantly incurred via military spending, and it is no coincidence that the United States has a strong military presence in its creditor nations, like Germany, Japan, and South Korea. In fiscal years 2016 and 2017, the US military budget was projected to be close to $600 billion annually, accounting for over 50 percent of all federal discretionary spending. And in March 2017, President Trump requested a 10 percent increase for 2018.27 As Melinda Cooper so aptly puts it, “The irony here is that the exorbitant military expenditure of the United States has been financed through the very debt imperialism it is designed to enforce!”28 It is no wonder, then, that US debt imperialism has been described as the “greatest rip- off ever achieved.”29 Thus far, even the entrance of China and China’s status as the greatest US creditor have not witnessed a radi-cal destabilization of US debt imperialism, even as this has disrupted the long- standing US fantasy since the latter half of the nineteenth century about gaining access to China’s fabled market.

US military empire has been called an empire of bases, prolifer-ated globally, especially in Asia and the Pacific, during and after World War II, the Cold War, on through the more recent War on Terror, and now as part of the new twenty- first- century Asia- Pacific pivot. Yet if we consider, again, the very founding of the United States, we would recall that the young nation’s ever- westward expansion during the nineteenth century depended on the stationing of soldiers in more than 250 mili-tary forts. The establishment of an overseas empire beginning with the 1898 Spanish- American War also depended on the expansion of overseas bases. During World War II, “island hopping” across the Pacific (through Guam, Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa) for the bombing of Japan witnessed an expansion of US bases, as did the inheritance of the British basing structure. By 1945, over 44 percent of all US military facilities overseas were located in the Pacific, with the extensive global network stretching from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica.30 And although the more than 2,000 overseas installations during World War II had dwindled to 582 by 1949, as the Cold War escalated, especially in Korea, the number by 1957 had risen to 815, and yet higher to 1,104 by the peak of the Vietnam War. Two- thirds of these bases were in South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and West Germany, and they continue to be located there as of the release of the 2009 Base Structure Report of the US Department of Defense.31 Notably, before US forces withdrew in 1992, the former US colony of the Philip-pines hosted one of the most significant and vast US military complexes in the world, employing seventy thousand Filipinos and thirteen thousand US military personnel. Clark Field became the second largest US airbase



on the planet, and Subic Bay became the largest American naval facility outside the United States.32

In terms of land, the US military controls 29 million acres of ter-ritory, with approximately 635,000 acres of that located overseas and made available by host governments. In terms of cost and value, military installations within the continental United States are worth more than $600 billion, and overseas installations more than $124 billion. Crucially, these figures do not include recent base buildups in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, nor do they include the value of the twenty-three thou-sand buildings, structures, and installations leased by the United States in Asia and Europe. The United States, in other words, is not only the biggest military power in the world but also the world’s biggest landlord and leaseholder.33

The public debt of settler colonialism has thus been linked with a more specific debt driven by military spending in the post– World War II conjuncture. Settler colonialism is at once military empire’s proving ground, obscured condition of possibility, and imbricated partner in vio-lence. Settler colonialism conditions and makes possible debt imperialism. Scott Morgensen makes the important observation that the biopolitics of settler colonialism and the displacement of Native peoples and nations “form a transnational proving ground within settler societies to produce a white settler state for imperial projection abroad.”34 In the case of the United States, the territoriality of settler colonial and imperial projec-tions of power include not only the fifty states (or incorporated territories) but also a variety of unincorporated and discontiguous territories. In the Pacific, these are the unincorporated territories of Guam and American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the three Compact of Free Association nations of the Marshall Islands, the Feder-ated States of Micronesia, and Palau. If debt imperialism is the promise that does not require keeping, this proving ground, or stolen land, or fatally irradiated territory in the case of the Marshall Islands, is the prom-ise that does not have to be made at all.

As I have written elsewhere, to speak of the militarization that pro-duced and continues to reproduce the United States as a white settler state and military empire is to speak of a way of life.35 Militarization exceeds the temporal parameters of war, the spatial demarcations of military bases, the functional ends of military institutions, and the enlistment of military personnel. Militarization, in other words, is all of these things, yet more. Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address about the dangers of a “military- industrial complex” acquiring unwarranted power turns out to have been prescient and necessary, but ultimately unheeded. Today, a constellation of phenomena, historical processes, and subjectivities can be


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properly characterized, and need to be urgently critiqued, as militarized. These include militarized humanitarianism, militarized diaspora, milita-rized adoption, militarized prostitution, militarized kinship, militarized capitalism, and militarized settler colonialism.36 What does it mean that the term militarized serves as a correct adjective, appearing in a host of modifier- noun couplings that at first seem oxymoronic or unlikely but upon closer critical examination are compatible, coconstitutive, and verg-ing on the tautological?

In their important anthology Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolo-nized Future in Asia and the Pacific, Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Cama-cho analyze militarization “as an extension of colonialism and its gendered and racialized processes,” interrogating how “colonial histories constitute the conditions of possibility for ongoing forms of militarization.”37 Inva-sion and annexation of Hawai‘i, territorial acquisition of Guam, genocidal colonial conquest of the Philippines, occupation of Japan and Okinawa, wars in Korea and Vietnam — these have been some of the militarized US campaigns in Asia and the Pacific spanning over a century thus far. Asian and Pacific migration to the United States has been significantly consti-tuted by this protracted history of militarized intervention, especially its Cold War phase.

As Cynthia Enloe observed, the Pacific Rim is strung together with a necklace of US military bases, violently producing a “militarized inter-connectedness.”38 This necessitates intellectual, political, and cultural projects that can take that interconnectedness into critical account while being attentive to local specificities, differences, and hierarchies. To name just a few examples, the history of Japanese empire and militarism in Asia and the Pacific, Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, and specific develop-ments such as the May 2012 US- Japan agreement to withdraw nine thou-sand US troops from Okinawa and transfer them to Guam, Hawai‘i, and Australia challenge assumptions of a coherent or homogeneous “Pacific Rim” or “Asia- Pacific.” Yet to the extent that Asia and the Pacific have been and continue to be strategic sites and staging grounds of US settler modernity, or the locus of a militarized interconnectedness, they and their futures are enchained.

While we can use the terms militarization and militarism interchange-ably, we might also think of militarization as the process that both con-tributes to and is the effect of militarism. Next, militarism, in turn, indexes something much more pervasive than the collusion between the military and the arms industry named by Eisenhower’s military- industrial com-plex. We might conceptualize instead “regimes of militarism” as the colo-nial and neocolonial nexus of state and capital that generates a prolifera-tion of military logics beyond formal military institutions and sites, and beyond the war- making, peacekeeping, and security functions of the mili-



tary itself. Regimes of militarism constitute US liberal military empire, and they pervade the ideological and institutional, the material and dis-cursive, the global and local, and act as a structuring force and logic not only in international geopolitical relations but also in the daily and inti-mate lives of (neo)colonized and gendered racial subjects. These regimes of militarism come with a high price tag: they drive US debt imperialism. As I discuss below, even as these regimes of militarism incur a debt that the United States does not need to repay, they install a figurative economy of what we might call militarized indebtedness onto the colonized. That is, they are made to feel indebted to the United States for its military inter-vention, often rescripted as “liberation” or, in the case of the Cold War, as the championing of freedom against communist totalitarianism.

This conjunction of military empire and settler colonialism, or set-tler modernity, is a debt relation linking statecraft and capital. If settler modernity is an incomplete project, an ensemble of relations requiring continual re-creation and renovation, it mirrors the capitalist “delirium” of debt imperialism and of the debt form. As Cooper argues, “In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare mini-mum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ulti-mate limit, to be deflected at all costs.”39 She goes on to observe that the American state, insofar as its continued self- reproduction coincides with the temporality of perpetual debt, is a nation that in economic terms has become purely promissory or fiduciary. This suggests a double move-ment in which “the very loss of foundation is precisely what enables the United States to endlessly refound itself, in the most violent and material of ways.” In this sense, debt imperialism is at once deterritorializing and reterritorializing, at once speculative and materialist; “the endless revolu-tion (rolling over) of debt and the endless restoration of nationhood are inseparably entwined. The one enables the other. And the one perpetu-ates the other.”40 This dialectic of revolution- restoration, to elaborate on the contextual remarks I provided earlier on the very founding of the US nation, is the very logic of settler colonialism as both a structure and an event. And settler colonialism, the foundational and literally territorial condition of possibility of the United States, cannot be acknowledged as such, as the debt that is owed to Native Americans. This, conjoined with debt imperialism, the debt that is acknowledged but perpetually rolled over — the promise never made that makes possible and is conjoined with the promise never kept — attempts to deterritorialize and revolutionize, yet the US nation must also reterritorialize and restore or refound itself through the establishment of a military empire. The attendant tempo-ral logic of this spatial dynamic, as Cooper writes, is a paradoxical time



warp where the future and the past morph into each other without ever finding grounding in the present.41 If the unmade promise resides in an unacknowledged past, and the unkept promise can only be said to be that when the future itself becomes a past that will have been, then the present is the time of a holding to final account.

The deflection of the present makes possible settler modernity’s con-tinual reproduction through a variety of literal and figurative debt rela-tions. It is a debt regime that functions in multiple ways. On the one hand, it is the debt to Indigenous communities that is unacknowledged. On the other hand, it provides the collateral for various debtor/creditor schemes. It is also, as I have elaborated, debt imperialism, or the debt that does not have to be repaid. Yet still, it continues to produce debt for various popu-lations who are vulnerable to crushing indebtedness, or what Harvey calls “debt incumbency.”42 These seemingly antonymous forms of debt, or the deft ability of debt to operate as a sleight of hand, make crushingly clear how debt is not a strict economic relation.

The colonial and capitalist nexus of race, gender, and sexuality dis-tributes debt and vulnerability to debt unevenly. This uneven distribution, or debt as governmentality, is what I call the necropolitics of the promise. The etymology of promise, from the Old French promesse, is a pledge, vow, guarantee, or assurance. From Latin, promissum is the noun use of the neuter past participle of promittere, which is to send forth, let go, foretell, or assure beforehand. Keeping in mind this temporal dimension of what a promise means and what it means to promise, I contend that the US abandonment of the gold standard has ushered in a fatal double stan-dard. Even as the United States rolls over its debts indefinitely, it imposes structural adjustment policies, austerity measures, and foreclosures on other debtor countries and populations. Variously labeled Third World debtors, subprime borrowers, and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) of sub- Saharan Africa, these debtors are compelled to keep their promises, for failure to do so results in punishment and discipline. Some promises demand repayment more than others, and some must conform to the homogeneous time of repayment more than others.

The debtor- creditor relationship is not simply governed through the borrowing and lending of money but animated and enforced by an already existing asymmetry in power relations. As such, debt indexes not only the state and sum of money owed but also a broader social relation struc-tured by violent disciplinary protocols compelling the indebted to conduct themselves in a manner that will maximize the likelihood of repayment. In this sense, to be indebted is not simply to owe money. It is to inhabit a subjectivity that robs one of the possibility of having multiple futures, multiple ways of conducting oneself and being in the world. This, then, is the relationship between debt and time: debt neutralizes time so that it



conforms to the homogeneous time of repayment.43 Writing on the ascen-dance of neoliberalism and the debt economy since the 1970s, and follow-ing Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on debt, Maurizio Lazzarato observes, “The credit relation does not mobilize physical and intellectual abilities as labor does . . . but the morality of the debtor, his mode of existence (his ‘ethos’). The importance of the debt economy lies in the fact that it appropriates and exploits both chronological labor time and action, non- chronological time, time as choice, decision, a wager on what will happen and on the forces (trust, desire, courage, etc.) that make choice, decision, and action possible.”44

Indeed, whole nations and populations of the world have been sad-dled with permanent debt and cannot liberate themselves from the debt bind. They are subjected to what Gayatri Spivak calls “credit- baiting” and what Miranda Joseph has called a “pedagogy of ‘entrepreneurial’ sub-jectivity.”45 Indeed, we witness a role reversal in which the actual debtors have transmogrified into creditors, and vice versa. As Frantz Fanon writes, “Europe is the literal creation of the Third World.”46 That is, Europe and the United States owe a huge debt to the world that created them. Yet the afterlife of colonial plunder persists through the neocolonial policies, for example, of institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose officials Federici calls the conquistadors of today.47 David Graeber suggests that a debt is “just the perversion of a promise,” a promise “corrupted by both math and violence.”48 Yet for persons and places marked by a debt that, as Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva write, “cannot be settled even with death,”49 debt is not simply a perversion of a promise. As I see it, debt in this instance is itself both a relation and an instrument of violence converted by the strange math of settler modernity and racial capitalism into a promissory note that binds for some but not for others. To promise, and to be promised, can mean radically different things depending on where the debtor, whether a nation or an individual, is located within asymmetries of power that are at once shifting and enduring. This asymmetrical relation is now triangulated by China, a newly emergent creditor building what journalist Howard French calls a “new empire” in Africa.50

The creation of crushing indebtedness through the necropolitics of the promise, or debt as the foreclosure of freedom, futurity, and at times of life itself, enjoins us to ask how debt as both a literal and figurative economy also emerges as the effect of freedom, emancipation, or libera-tion. Saidiya Hartman writes that emancipation for the enslaved in the US instituted indebtedness via a calculus of blame and responsibility through which the newly freed were obliged to repay their emancipators’ “invest-ment of faith” and demonstrate their worthiness. This figurative economy of indebtedness compelling submission and servitude was conjoined to a



literal one in which Black laborers were rendered vulnerable to peonage and debt servitude. In this way, the transition from slavery to freedom, writes Hartman, constructed “an already accrued debt, abstinent pres-ent, and a mortgaged future. In short, to be free was to be a debtor — that is, obliged and duty- bound to others.”51 Yet what of debt when whole nations are also “liberated”? In this instance, gratitude is enfigured as indebtedness through the scripting of military intervention and imperial violence as a bestowal or gift of national liberation. If the literal financial economy of debt can be rewritten as a form of US imperial power, debt can also function as a figurative economy or narrative structure animat-ing that power. The United States is able to leverage, convert, and narrate indebtedness into imperial might. Yet the structure of feeling imposed on those who are “liberated” from imperial or colonial domination is one of gratitude or indebtedness. Writing in the context of US imperialism in Asia, Lisa Yoneyama argues that the “imperialist myth of liberation and rehabilitation” confers belatedness and indebtedness.52 The newly liber-ated nation, a pre- or protodemocracy, experiences a belatedness vis- à- vis political modernity. Yet it must demonstrate again and again an indebted-ness to its imperial liberator for making the presumed eventual arrival at political modernity possible in the first place. But in the end, this moment of arrival never quite arrives, so the debt can never be fully repaid.53

If debt can thus be the foreclosure of freedom as well as its effect, I am compelled to ask, by way of a conclusion, how we might abolish the debt relation altogether. To be clear, this call for debt abolition is different from debt forgiveness. The latter only clears particular debts, whereas the former eliminates debt as such. Put differently, this is to ask about the dif-ference between the abolishment of settler modernity and “forgiveness” industries and processes such as liberal philanthropy, truth and recon-ciliation commissions, reparations, and transitional justice. These latter processes are the symptoms of, the placeholders for, an as yet unrealized horizon. For the figurative debt, might it be possible to enact a politics that calls on us to view the debt not as an invitation to coevality or lib-eral political modernity that we cannot refuse, but as an engulfment into the suffocating embrace of imperial and gendered racial violence? For the literal debt, this politics calls on us to refuse the debt by harnessing the power of a collective default against the bullying threat of US debt impe-rialism. This is to embrace something along the lines of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the place of bad debt, “the debt that cannot be repaid . . . the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt”54 — and the student debt. This debt without creditor ges-tures to an alternative social relation and economy and refuses quid pro quo calculations of reciprocity. Indeed, if debt in an alternative sense is



a lateral form of reciprocity and obligation, or the very thing that makes sociality possible, the debt regimes of liberal military empire and settler colonialism have converted and perverted that sociality into necropolitical social hierarchy. In this sense, to inquire into this conversion is to perform a social autopsy, to encounter the mortuary of the already dead and the living dead, all the while apprehending that what remains and awaits our embrace are those stubborn refusals.

Notes

I thank the coeditors of this special issue, Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, for their collective brilliance, unwavering vision, and steadfast commitment. Thanks in particular to Alyosha, whose generous reading of and incisive comments on an earlier version of this essay made a crucial difference. Thanks also to the engaged audiences at the various gatherings at which I presented earlier versions of this work.

1. Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben,” 117.2. Byrd, Transit of Empire, xxvi.3. Goldstein, “Introduction,” 9. My essay is an attempt to contribute to the

work of, as Goldstein puts it, placing “U.S. overseas empire and settler colonialism into the same analytic frame” (4).

4. Ibid., 3.5. Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference”; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the

Elimination of the Native”; Wolfe, “Structure and Event.”6. Day, Alien Capital, 19, 20.7. Wallach, “NAFTA on Steroids.” The twelve participating nations thus far

are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The United States withdrew from the agreement on 23 January 2017.

8. Baker and Sang- Hun, “Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury.’ ”9. See Hogeland, Founding Finance; Wright, One Nation under Debt; and Kon-

ings, Development of American Finance.10. Park, “Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America,” 1009.11. US Constitution, 14th Amendment, passed 1866, ratified 1868.12. Marx, Capital, 915.13. Robinson, Black Marxism.14. Marx, Capital, 919.15. Ibid., 940.16. Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” 19.17. Luxemburg, “Accumulation of Capital.”18. Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” 19.19. Harvey, New Imperialism, 143 – 44.20. Federici, Caliban and the Witch; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.21. Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” 22.22. Ibid., 26.23. According to the US Congressional Budget Office, in 2016 total US

national debt was $19.8 trillion ($14.3 trillion public and $5.4 trillion intergovern-mental) or approximately 106 percent of the previous twelve months of gross domes-



tic product. Of this, approximately 45 percent of the public debt was held by foreign investors, principally Japan and China. US Congressional Budget Office, “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2016 – 2026.”

24. Hudson, Super Imperialism.25. For an insightful explanation of debt imperialism and its connection to

the capitalist speculation in the life sciences within the context of neoliberalism, see Cooper, Life as Surplus.

26. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 193.27. See the 2017 fiscal year budget proposal for the US Department of Defense,

“Department of Defense (DoD) Releases Fiscal Year 2017 President’s Budget Proposal.”

28. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 164.29. Hudson, Super Imperialism, xiii.30. Calder, Embattled Garrisons, 14.31. Höhn and Moon, “Politics of Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Class in the

U.S. Military Empire,” 7 – 8.32. Calder, Embattled Garrisons, 12.33. Ibid., 6 – 7.34. Morgensen, Spaces between Us, 161.35. Kim, “Militarization.”36. For an excellent analysis of “settler militarism” in Hawai‘i, see Nebolon,

“ ‘Life Given Straight from the Heart.’ ”37. Shigematsu and Camacho, “Introduction,” xv.38. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, 85. For other important critiques of

US militarism, especially in Asia and the Pacific, see Höhn and Moon, Over There; Moon, Sex among Allies; Lutz, Bases of Empire; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll; Johnson, Blowback; and Johnson, Sorrows of Empire.

39. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 31.40. Ibid., 165.41. Ibid., 163 – 64, 31.42. Harvey, New Imperialism, 147.43. Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 45.44. Ibid., 55.45. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 237; Joseph, Debt to Society, xii.46. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 58 – 59.47. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 17.48. Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 391.49. Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and

Debt,” 365.50. French, China’s Second Continent.51. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 131.52. Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice,” 80.53. For an excellent analysis of this figurative debt regime in relation to the

Vietnam War, see Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom.54. Moten and Harney, “Debt and Study,” 1.

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