Reckoning with History and the US Empire: Guest Lecture with Professor Moon-Ho Jung

The Western Gallery is pleased to welcome Professor Moon-Ho Jung from the University of Washington. Through examples from his recent book, Menace to Empire, and reflections on researching and teaching US history, Moon-Ho Jung will discuss how we might reckon with empire to generate radical interpretations of US history and society.

Complimentary parking available in Lot 17G.

Moon-Ho Jung is Professor of History and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (University of California Press, 2022), winner of the David Montgomery Award of the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working -Class History Association and the Theodore Saloutos Book Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), winner of the Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians and the History Book Award of the Association for Asian American Studies. He is currently at work on a synthesis of Asian American history titled America Never Was America to Us: Reckoning with Colonialism, Slavery, and Asian American History.

About Menace to Empire:

One of Smithsonian Magazine's Favorite Books of 2022.

This history reveals how radical threats to the United States empire became seditious threats to national security and exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian racism. Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond.

Jung examines how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that engendered and haunted the national security state—the heart and soul of the US empire ever since.

Access the text from University of California Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/menace-to-empire/hardcover