Where do interpretations of empire and militarism in relation to diaspora and future imaginaries emerge as we work across disciplines and forms of knowledge? This panel identifies four sites in which militarism and empire constellate boundaries and sensibilities surrounding everyday life and afterlives. These constellations complicate conventional conceptions of their spatial and temporal demarcations. The papers incisively reveal the military-industrial complex’s interiority as an actor in dispossessing and manufacturing land, knowledge, autonomy, and bodies as entities to be distilled and recycled into empire’s ever-evolving throes. Simultaneously, these papers illuminate how communities continue to live, thrive, and imagine their futures and solidarities.

In line with this year’s theme, we are grounded in multi-disciplinary and transnational approaches that push and complicate the bounds of Asian American Studies. This panel extends understandings of the affective and material conditions shaping the (im)possibilities of the reproduction of militarized violence and alternative futures. Newberry considers how the military-industrial complex polycrises-making is met with self-determination and radical continuums of care in Okinawa. Relatedly, Nham begins to propose how inquiries into toxic exposure around closed and realigned military bases repurposed for carceral functions might help enumerate some of these crises, their dependencies, and their continuations. Yasuda similarly examines the recycled infrastructure, knowledge, and personnel cultivated by empires to explore how imperialism and militarism affects the everyday choices and futures of colonized peoples. Lastly, le asks how to consider lineages of medical historiography as co-constitutive with the historiography of militarism and U.S. empire.