Technology and Culture

Since time immemorial, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands has been the ancestral home of the ri-Kuwajleen. For nearly eight decades, it has also been the site of a massive U.S. military installation that is central to the American nuclear program and force posture. Lauren Hirshberg's brilliant cultural history of the U.S. militarization of Kwajalein explores the too-often-overlooked racialized, colonial dimensions of the U.S. military-industrial-academic complex.

The places and peoples of Kwajalein Atoll—American and Marshallese; civilian and military—anchor Suburban Empire. This is a book about place-making—about the contested ways in which the U.S. military endeavored to transform ri-Kuwajleen places into both a technologically sophisticated military installation and a simulacrum of a segregated American suburb. The U.S. military used facilities at Kwajalein to provide logistical support for nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands during the 1940s and 1950s. From the 1950s to the present day, the atoll has served as an "impact zone" for U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile targeting shots. Hirshberg argues that the suburbanization of Kwajalein served to sanitize the geographical expansion of the U.S. nuclear complex by obscuring its violent emplacement abroad in expropriated Native lands and waters.

The book begins with an exploration of the interplay between securitization and racialization in the U.S. colonization of the Marshall Islands from the 1940s through the 1960s. Once administered by Japan as part of a League of Nations mandate, the United States invaded in 1944 and in 1947 designated the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands as a part of a one-of-a-kind United Nations "strategic trusteeship." The international colonial status authorized U.S. militarization and justified U.S. use of sites in the Marshall Islands for nuclear blasting and missile targeting. Hirshberg enriches the first chapter's overview of important events during this time period by exploring how they were commemorated and represented in local publications like Bell Laboratories pamphlets, the Atomic Blast, the Marshall Post Inquirer, and the Micronesian Monthly.

The core of Suburban Empire, developed in chapters 2, 3, and 4, offers a rich and difficult-to-summarize exploration of the U.S. expropriation of lands at Kwajalein and the imposition of a regime of racial segregation that shaped [End Page 390] life on the atoll from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Army's cultivation of Kwajalein as an American home, Hirshberg shows, required Marshallese land and labor but also demanded the erasure of Marshallese people and placemaking. The U.S. Army paid Marshallese laborers reduced wages and enforced residential and social segregation by confining Islanders to the overcrowded, poorly resourced islet of Ebeye. In order to recruit American civilian engineers and scientists to work at the base, meanwhile, Army planners developed the U.S. residential area to physically and culturally resemble a domestic suburb. As a part of this, U.S. anti-Black racism traveled to Kwajalein, inflecting relationships between American and Marshallese communities and individuals. Through extensive archival work, Hirshberg evokes the texture of daily life across the atoll, from the base to the more intimate spaces where Americans and Islanders lived, worked, learned, and played.

The book turns in the fifth chapter to Marshallese political mobilization on the eve of decolonization in the 1970s and 1980s. Hirshberg carefully reconstructs the events leading up to "Operation Homecoming," a dramatic 1982 protest in which over one thousand Marshallese individuals sailed into and occupied the impact zone to reclaim the atoll as a ri-Kuwajleen place. Here, Hirshberg highlights the work of Marshallese activists and leaders including Julian Riklon, Ataji Balos, Amata Kabua, and many others, while simultaneously attending to the ways in which mobilization was constrained by U.S. pressure and censorship.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands ultimately became a state "in free association" with the United States in 1986. Hirshberg examines decolonization in chapter 6, attending to the nuanced ways in which free association...