This chapter examines the representation of militarized modernity in American literature through three Korean immigrant writers: Richard E. Kim, Ty Pak, and Henz Insu Fenkl. Initially developed to explain anticommunist statecraft and gendered citizenship in South Korea during its military regimes, militarized modernity proves a productive term for exploring the culture of the migratory circuit between South Korea and the United States. By reading Korean immigrant writers through the lens of militarized modernity, the chapter goes against the critical tendency to view militarized modernity as exclusive to countries in the developing world. Instead, it argues that Korean immigrant writings show militarized modernity as already a part of American literature by foregrounding the traces of their own context of production that register both US imperialism and the ambiguous, changing status of South Korea from occupied country to ally, and finally, to sub-empire.

Early modern European imperialism in the Americas is distinctive in the broader history of empires in its fusion of economic interests and geopolitical rivalries with religious objectives and rationales, despite sectarian divides. Taking a comparative hemispheric perspective, this chapter provides an overview of the imperial contexts in which colonial literatures emerged in the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires in the Americas and describes the development of the various colonial literary and generic landscapes in these realms in terms of their diverse modes of economic exploitation and political domination within an emergent global capitalist system.

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.