Book Talk. Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire

Join the Center for Critical Democracy Studies for a book talk with historian Alvita Akiboh on "Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire" (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The book will be commented by Melanie Bavaria (AUP/NYU), Mariana Dias Paes (AUP), Gabrielle Guillerm (Sorbonne Université), and Andrea Rosengarten (AUP).

In Imperial Material, Alvita Akiboh reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. These symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of local power, their original intent transmogrified. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the imperial United States, whose presence announced itself on every bit of currency, every stamp, and the local flag.

Alvita Akiboh is a US historian specializing in the history of US overseas colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. She earned her PhD in History from Northwestern University and BA in History from Indiana University. Before coming to Yale, Akiboh was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.