Writing Westward Podcast 015 - Manu Karuka - Empire's Tracks

Writing Westward Podcast       Episode 015

 

Manu Karuka

Empires Tracks:
Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

 

 

[download mp3]

Manu Karuka is Assistant Professor of American Studies, and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad was published by the University of California Press in 2019 in their "American Crossroads" series.

Empire's Tracks takes familiar histories of American westward expansion and transcontinental railroad construction and retells them through the often missing contexts of captialism, finance, and what Karuka terms a "military-finance nexus." Viewed as "continental imperialism," Karuka shows how the entreprises of expansion, military conquest, and capitalist enterprise were intertwined and that their continental extension unfolded over colonized territories, not American homelands. By featuring histories of how Natives peoples and Chinese laborers experienced the transcontinetnal railroad story, Empire's Tracks expands our view of history. Integrations of global economic networks, political and economic philosophy, and post-colonial literature and theory offer a powerful set of lenses through which to read old stories anew.

 

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