Chapter 2 - Racial Management and Technologies of Care

Summary

In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.