Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Hardcover

Donoghue, Michael E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082235666X ISBN 13: 9780822356660

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

The construction, maintenance, and defense of the Panama Canal brought Panamanians, U.S. soldiers and civilians, West Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans into close, even intimate, contact. In this lively and provocative social history, Michael E. Donoghue positions the Panama Canal Zone as an imperial borderland where U.S. power, culture, and ideology were projected and contested. Highlighting race as both an overt and underlying force that shaped life in and beyond the Zone, Donoghue details how local traditions and colonial policies interacted and frequently clashed. Panamanians responded to U.S. occupation with proclamations, protests, and everyday forms of resistance and acquiescence. Although U.S. "Zonians" and military personnel stigmatized Panamanians as racial inferiors, they also sought them out for service labor, contraband, sexual pleasure, and marriage. The Canal Zone, he concludes, reproduced classic colonial hierarchies of race, national identity, and gender, establishing a model for other U.S. bases and imperial outposts around the globe.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael E. Donoghue is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University.

Review:

"In this fascinating social history, Michael E. Donoghue breaks new ground by exploring not just a single group in the Panama Canal Zone, but all of the diverse and conflicted resident populations and the relationships between them, particularly in the years after World War II. He shows how societies in conflict also collaborated, and he locates these interactions in relation to the broader U.S. imperial project in the Canal Zone." (John Lindsay-Poland, author of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama)

"As the newly expanded Panama Canal opens to pose historic challenges to U.S. trade and diplomacy, Michael E. Donoghue's timely, superbly written, and remarkably researched book is unsurpassed in giving us a social history of the century-long American empire in Panama—with welcome emphases on the post-1945 years, the multiethnic Panamanian perspectives, the long-lasting U.S. imperial experiences, and their legacies for the twenty-first century." (Walter LaFeber, Andrew and James Tisch University Professor Emeritus, Cornell University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 082235666X
• ISBN 13: 9780822356660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368