Chapter 8 - Transnational American Cities

Summary

Traditional scholarship on cities has ignored the impact of warfare, except insofar as cities have been totally destroyed, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, or as they have been rebuilt, as Berlin was after World War II. These cities are usually treated in primarily nationalist terms, emphasizing their roles in the respective combatant nations. This chapter treats several global cities in transnational terms, noting how the effects of the specific military conflicts have secondary consequences that transgress geopolitical borders and permit us to recognize shared suffering by combatants from different nations by focusing on Camilo Mejía’s memoir of the Iraq War, The Road from ar Ramadi (2007), and Jason Hall’s film about Iraq War veterans, Thank You for Your Service (2017). Managua, San José (Costa Rica), Miami, Boston, al Ramadi, and Topeka have little in common as modern cities, but the US-led neoimperial wars in Central America and the Middle East bring all of these cities and their inhabitants together in terrifyingly similar ways. New scholarly studies of modern cities need to interpret just these transnational intersections.