Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

Research output: Contribution to journalLiterature reviewpeer-review

Abstract

Carving across the plains, mountains, and plateaus of the American West, trains forge the bedrock of the mythic United States. From John Ford’s early silent film, The Iron Horse (1924), to the monumental collaboration between Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall, How the West Was Won (1962), epic stories of pioneers and explorers, goldminers and capitalists, cowboys and Indians comprise an “imaginary nation,” closely guarded, as if the myths might crumble if prodded too closely. Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad does just that, evoking a different story. Karuka pans out, past singular heroes and epic conquests, taking a panoramic view of the larger material and structural relationships between the peoples, landscapes, and technology at the intersections of colonial expansion and globalizing capitalism. By using the methodologies of decolonial thinking to read the creation of what we now call the nation’s “interior,” Empire’s Tracks draws out the deep structures of empire in a way that both provincializes and dismantles the exceptionalist and individualist notions central to American mythmaking.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEuropean Journal of American Studies
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes

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