Description
Roughly 870 miles from Hawai’i lies Kalama atoll, an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the United States (what others may refer to as Johnston Atoll). Merely fifty square miles, the atoll has been claimed, dredged, bombed, and polluted by the U.S. military. Conducting an ecological-political history of the atoll, we analyze how the alleged smallness and remoteness of the atoll has allowed the U.S. military apparatus to destroy it in order to meet the needs of empire, by carrying out toxic testing and storage on the atoll. In doing this, and inspired by Epeli Hau’ofa, we provide a counter-history in which we propose a spatial and political perspective of bigness rather than smallness, which allows an alternative rendering of Oceania than the one championed by U.S. understandings. We show how the representation and folding of space helps to hide imperial power. Our analysis of the topology of Kalama Atoll significantly adds to the understanding of the U.S. empire’s anatomy and the role that islands, and particularly the uninhabited Guano islands, have played in the production of American security and sovereignty. Second, through this typology, we show how empire can be a continuous laboratory as opposed to a grand scheme or plan. Our analysis shows that empire can be contingent, accidental, and incomplete. With these contributions, we hope that this presentation helps open up alternative readings of and relationships with places that are seemingly predetermined by empire as places of exploitation, nothingness, or laboratory-like experimentation.
