Disintegrating Empire examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. After World War II, social work teams, midlevel bureaucrats, and government ministries stitched specialized social services for Algerians into the structure of the midcentury welfare state. Once the Algerian Revolution began in 1954, many successive administrations and eventually two independent states—France and Algeria—continuously tailored welfare to support social aid services for Algerian families migrating across the Mediterranean. Disintegrating Empire reveals the belated collapse of specialized services more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state’s story, Elise Franklin argues, was not one merely of rise and fall but of winnowing services to “deserving” clients. Defunding social services—long associated with the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and beyond—has a much longer history defined by exacting controls on colonial citizens and migrants of newly independent countries. Disintegrating Empire explores the dynamic, conflicting, and often messy nature of these relationships, which show how Algerian family migration prompted by decolonization ultimately exposed the limits of the French welfare state.

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas. An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire. In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Emily Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

The BattleLord would never truly understand the combination of genetics and cosmic circumstances that had thrust him through the Veil that separates the Light from the Dark Matter Universe. His biological being is subsumed by symbiotic infections, restoring his youth and vitality, repairing a lifetime of damage to his body, rendering him impervious to all but the most horrific of wounds. Discovered by the Dough Boys, his physical makeup is further enhanced by the inclusion of shields, weapons, and data organization devices. These strange beings seek to create a tool from the only being known to be capable of crossing the barrier between the Universes. By utilizing his unique capabilities, he lives entire lifetimes on varied worlds and places throughout the natural universe. With loving guidance from the peoples of these worlds, he acquires the moral convictions that have since guided his every action. Driven to know the why of it all, he confronts the Maker, a being, entity, or machine that has existed since the very beginning of time. Agreeing to accept the Maker's unconditional offer of ultimate knowledge, the BattleLord becomes subjected to a total reformation. He is rebuilt, atom by atom, to form a being that is no longer truly a product of either the Light Matter or the Dark, but a unique combination of both. Armed with the boon of immortality, The BattleLord explores new worlds to ensure the continuation of sentient life throughout the cosmos.