Digesting the Empire: Embodying Life beyond Militarized Circulations across the Pacific

Sang Eun Eunice Lee
Literature
UC San Diego

My dissertation, “Digesting the Empire: Embodying Life beyond Militarized Circulations across the Pacific Ocean,” argues that people in and around the Pacific Ocean both physically and metaphorically digest circulated waste materials to survive beyond the dispossession and slow violence of the US empire and its military in the modern era. Focusing on two matters—meatpacking byproducts and radioactive materials—I trace the ideological foundation for medical research and imperial expansion and its incommensurability with indigenous and diasporic communities’ worldviews and ways of life. I argue, on one hand, that medical discourses, such as obesity research and radiation dosimetry, pathologize racialized and gendered bodies as disposable and fragmentable parts. On the other hand, literary and cultural texts of survival discursively digest and resist the empire’s pollutant matters. They conceptualize a broader and more entangled sense of the “body” by imagining a future different from current forms of imperial exploitation, displacement, and dispossession through medicine. Through the concept of digestion—which I theorize as constant interactions that fold the environment into the body and resist clear demarcations of the body from its surroundings—I explore the links between knowledge, the body, and the surrounding environment.