Week 5: Charlene Chan, Section 2

Week 5: Imperial University

Charlene Chan

Section 2

April 30, 2017

Week 5: Imperial University

Hamamoto’s “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence” examined the proliferance of violent, racially-based murders in the context of a rise in serial and mass murders in the past decades. He cites a study by Archer and Gartner that points to a causal relationship between the “rise in civilian murder and state ‘legitimation’ of violence during the Vietnam war” (Hamamoto, 280). I feel that the normalization of mass killings and violence overseas war also led to desensitization of the public to deaths of people who were deemed “foreign”, or “other”. In this same trend, the rise in race murders (especially of Asians) stems from the fetishization of Asian women in tandem with this normalization, as seen in the case of Myong: “often beaten, drugged, and forced to reenact scenes from the dozens of Asian-themed porn videos” (Hamamoto, 285).

“Imperial University”, as defined by Maira and Chatterjee in The Imperial University, cites academia as playing an important role in “legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism and repression, domestically and globally” (Maira and Chatterjee, 6). Looking at the crimes that Hamamoto examined in the light of this definition, we can see the role that American exceptionalism played in the Vietnam War, leading to not only widespread death and destruction, but also to a more militaristic society.

The image I have attached below is one of the stereotyping of Asian women as China dolls, submissive and demure both sexually and socially, as in the rape-murder cases described in Hamamoto’s piece.

Question: How can we critically examine the role that the US's moral superiority plays in both the imperialisation of universities and the normalisation of both domestic and overseas violence?

References:
(n.d.). Retrieved from http://media1.break.com/dnet/media/684/923/2923684/china-dolljpg.jpg