Please join the Chloe Center for a conversation with Sam Klug and Juliet Nebolon, as they discuss their new books, The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization and Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of US Empire, respectively. These two historically informed books represent the cutting edge of scholarship on racism and US empire in the 20th century. 

Lunch will be served. 

RSVP for the panel discussion/lunch and sign up for office hours here (by March 3rd). Office hours are available for graduate students to meet with the authors individually and for undergraduate students to meet in a small group after the panel.

Speakers

Sam Klug is an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Loyola University Maryland. His research focuses on Black internationalism, U.S. foreign relations, global decolonization, and the history of ideas. His first book is The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Politico Magazine, Vox, Boston Review, Dissent, and other venues.

Juliet Nebolon (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Her research and teaching bring a transnational perspective to the study of race, indigeneity, and gender in the United States, with a particular focus on U.S. war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Her first book is Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of US Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

Description of The Internal Colony:

In The Internal Colony, Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light of a series of debates concerning self-determination, postcolonial economic development, and the meanings of colonialism and decolonization.

Description of Settler Militarism: 

Under martial law during World War II, Hawaiʻi was located at the intersection of home front and war front. In Settler Militarism, Juliet Nebolon shows how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of empire building in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She demonstrates how settler militarism operated through a regime of racial liberal biopolitics that purported to protect all people in Hawaiʻi, even as it intensified the racial and colonial differentiation of Kanaka Maoli, Asian settlers, and white settlers.