During a cool November dusk, Professor Emily Mitchell-Eaton’s book, New Destinations of Empire, Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States, had a panel discussion at its launch. Speakers on the panel included Professors Rebecca Upton (of global public and environmental health) and geography faculty Madeline Hamlin, Peter Klepeis, and Teo Ballvé.
The book begins with a discussion of what the title means, describing the United States and the many legal compacts and agreements it has with different groups of Pacific Islanders (specifically Marshall Islanders) as part of the empire of the United States. This makes the United States not just a physical place but also an idea of place that is to be administered, from the people who create and negotiate and write the laws and agreements to the people who sit at the border crossings and have to interpret these laws. And within that place, there exists the potentially messy legal placement of migrants, especially those with legal, if lesser-known, protections within that idea.
The Compact of Free Association (1986), which marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, simultaneously re-entrenched imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of visa-free migration to the U.S. for Marshallese citizens, creating a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Ark.
An 'all-white town' by design for much of the 20th century, Springdale has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration — having nearly quadrupled in size since 1980. In fact, Springdale is the largest Marshallese population center outside of the Marshall Islands, to the point where it also is home to an RMI Consulate. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai'i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both enables and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants' experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire. In examining two spatial processes — imperialism and migration — together, Professor Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, 'remote' sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.
The faculty spoke of the multidisciplinary nature of Professor Mitchell-Eaton’s book, and the idea that geographers follow problems, not disciplines — which is why the book is seen as having methods that cut across multiple disciplines, including historic research, interviews, oral history, policy studies, on-location and off-site, using qualitative and quantitative data to make its points, providing insights into the geographic imaginaries of remoteness, and the idea that the places we study and where we study from are not that different.
In her final remarks, Professor Mitchell-Eaton thanked all who attended. She spoke about the origins of the book, informing the audience that it had been 12 years in the making, from its beginnings in her doctoral thesis to its current published form. Through that time, she can only suggest to the students that one should ask open-ended questions, to understand that nothing in the future is pre-determined, and that no place is remote to its inhabitants.