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

Manu Karuka, assistant professor of American Studies, Barnard College, joins the SFSU community to discuss his pathbreaking new book, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad.

This new book reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee nations and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path.  Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism.  Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of US political economy.  Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous an Asian American hisories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of US imperialism.  This highlly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railraod laid the tracks of the US Empire.

Hosted by American Indian Studies and co-sponsored by Race and Resistance Studies and Latina/o Studies