Conclusion

The 1990s underground punk scene fostered a culture and politics of resistance against and an alternative to the triumphalism of US empire. Evaluating the successes and failures of the 1990s punk renaissance offers lessons for future alternative cultures seeking to use music to foster political change. Involvement in antiracist movements and protests against globalized capitalism, such as the 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” battles over inclusion within the punk scene, the dangers of becoming insular, and struggles over concrete political commitment versus sloganeering or “lifestylism” all highlight the challenges of creating and sustaining a music of rebellion.

Conclusion

Beginning with a discussion of the mainstream US news coverage of the 2016 mass shooting at a Latinx party at Pulse (an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida), this chapter connects Puerto Rico to the Philippines through Allan Isaac’s notion of “American tropics.” US empire is intimately tied to trans and queer necropolitics, exemplified by the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude (a Filipina trans woman) by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a white US Marine. However, queer and trans analyses are often elided within anti-imperialist scholarship and social movements. Inversely, a critique of empire is often missing from mainstream US queer and trans politics. Ultimately, this chapter calls for an integration of anti-imperialist politics with queer and trans social movements, especially within Filipina/o American diasporic nationalisms

Beyond the Map: How to Decolonize the History of US Empire

Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, recently published to much fanfare, takes as its starting point what Immerwahr calls a “conceptual filing error.” Born from his surprise at visiting the Philippines and encountering streets “named after US colleges” and university students speaking “virtually unaccented English,” the book contends that while most people have heard of the “big wars” the United States has waged, “the actual territory” of US empire “often slips from view.” In response to this alleged invisibility, Immerwahr has produced a new popular history of US empire, one focussed on officially annexed US colonies and military bases, as well as the states that lie beyond the “logo map” whose outlines are the continental United States (14–15). The book's first section quickly sketches the story of US westward expansion, mostly through the story of Daniel Boone, then moves on to more satisfying chapters detailing the annexation of the uninhabited Guano Islands, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as the resistance to annexation in the latter two cases; the section ends by recounting World War II battles over Pacific islands. The second half of the book examines the postwar period, contending that the United States “gave up territory” in this period because it “honed an extraordinary suite of technologies,” from screw threads to synthetic rubber, that allowed it to construct a “pointillist empire” of communication and infrastructural networks (17).