Paul B. Niell – författare

When the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana’s harbor on February 15, 1898, the United States joined local rebel forces to avenge the Maine and "liberate" Cuba from the Spanish empire. "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" So went the popular slogan. Little did the Cubans know that the United States was not going to give them freedom—in less than a year the American flag replaced the Spanish flag over the various island colonies of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Spurred by military successes and dreams of an island empire, the US annexed Hawai‘i that same year, even establishing island colonies throughout Micronesia and the Antilles.With the new governmental orders of creating new art, architecture, monuments, and infrastructure from the United States, the island cultures of the Caribbean and Pacific were now caught in a strategic scope of a growing imperial power. These spatial and visual objects created a visible confrontation between local indigenous, African, Asian, Spanish, and US imperial expressions. These material and visual histories often go unacknowledged, but serve as uncomplicated "proof" for the visible confrontation between the US and the new island territories. The essays in this volume contribute to an important art-historical, visual cultural, architectural, and materialist critique of a growing body of scholarship on the US Empire and the War of 1898. Imperial Islands seeks to reimagine the history and cultural politics of art, architecture, and visual experience in the US insular context. The authors of this volume propose a new direction of visual culture and spatial experience through nuanced terrains for writing, envisioning, and revising US-American, Caribbean, and Pacific histories. These original essays address the role of art and architecture in expressions of state power; racialized and gendered representations of the United States and its island colonies; and forms of resistance to US cultural presence. Featuring interdisciplinary approaches, Imperial Islands offers readers a new way of learning the ongoing significance of vision and experience in the US empire today, particularly for Caribbean, Latinx, Pilipinx, and Pacific Island communities.

This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850.This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community.The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies.