« Infrastructure is settler colonialism: Carrie Mott, ‘”The Last Victims of the Indian War”: Celilo Falls, the Dalles Dam, and Infrastructural Colonization’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023
Indigenous sovereignty is taxing (and rightly so): Maximilien Zahnd, ‘An Alaska tax story: Tribal sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the Indigenous tax space’, EPD, Society and Space, 2023 »

An airport is a settler colonial node: Jason Tuấn Vũ, ‘Bound Passages: Aviation, Deportation, and the Settler Carceral Transpacific’, Radical History Review, 147, 2023, pp. 137-157

25Oct23

Abstract: This article traces the settler-colonial histories of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) in Hawai‘i and Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport (GUM) in Guåhan (Guam) to chart the role of Indigenous dispossession in facilitating ongoing carceral transits across the Pacific. Focusing on the March 2021 deportation of thirty-three Vietnamese refugees from the United States, it situates the deportation flight’s layovers at HNL and GUM within larger processes of racial-colonial violence that constitute the development and operation of both airports. In this sense, HNL and GUM reveal the palimpsestic nature of Hawai‘i and Guåhan as sites of colonial occupation that, in turn, are used to bolster the further transit of global US empire. This essay thus attempts to chart a critical transpacific geography that links the settler-colonial and carceral dimensions of US empire through the issue of Southeast Asian deportation.


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