Race and America's Long War

“In this sweeping, erudite, and much-needed book, Nikhil Pal Singh obliterates any myth of American peace, revealing instead that the thread tying America’s past and present is long and continuous war—hot, vicious, global, and racial. Linking domestic and foreign terrains of combat, he reveals the various ways in which war and race are inextricably intertwined, whether packaged as wars on communism, terrorism, or crime.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times   Race and America's Long War is a brilliant and lacerating account of the United States' brutal and racially inflected 'inner and outer wars.' Singh forensically diagnoses the disfigurations the United States has wrought domestically and overseas through its traffic in violence and race, in the context of ever more rapacious and dehumanizing capital accumulation.—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies This thoughtful intervention will transform contemporary discussion. Singh calls for a complete reassessment of the political significance of struggles against structural racism. Beyond that, he asks a host of urgent, important questions about the fundamental importance of war to U.S. government and policing in their broadest definitions.—Paul Gilroy, author of Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture This is an extraordinarily timely publication. Singh’s framework upends traditional distinctions between global and national politics, tracing the ways that conflicts rooted in the ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ spheres rely on the same material infrastructure, political logic, and populist appeal. Singh illuminates the continuities in militarized thought and action across place and time: from settler colonial wars for territory and imperial excursions abroad to militarized policing at home.—Daniel Martinez HoSang, author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California   One of our great historians demonstrates his virtuosic ability to skate across huge territories of history with insight and precision.”—Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917