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British Association for American Studies ☰

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Jens Temmen

Jens Temmen is postdoctoral research assistant at the American Studies department at Heinrich-Heine-University DŸsseldorf (Germany). He received his PhD in American Studies as part of his PhD fellowship with the Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. His first monograph, titled The Territorialities of US Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century US Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing (UniversitŠtsverlag Winter, 2020), analyzes discourses of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territoriality in legal and literary narratives on the North American continent and in the Pacific. In 2016, he was a DAAD-funded visiting scholar at the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i at M_noa (USA). He is co-editor of an anthology titled Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of a Special Forum of the Journal for Transnational American Studies (JTAS) on “American Territorialities”. His postdoctoral research project employs an ecocritical lens to analyze representations of Mars colonization in contemporary US literature and culture.

The Un/Incorporated, Continental, Overseas, Global States of America: The Grammar of Jurisdictional Incongruence in US Imperialism

By | Published November 12, 2020

History Research

The notion of the United States as a (and eventually the sole) global power of the 20th and 21st century is a shorthand that seeks to reconcile the United States’ self-fashioned identity as an alleged vanguard of democracy, a proliferator of universal human rights, and an exceptional nation of liberty and peace with the way that this identity is projected and affirmed via violent imperial campaigns and colonial practices across the globe.[1] The fact that Thomas Jefferson foreshadowed this paradoxical identity in his vision of the United States as an “empire of liberty” (cf. Thomas 89) as early as the 1790s, suggests a historical dimension that has shaped the present narrative of a global and benevolent US empire. A thorough and critical reading of contemporary US imperialism necessarily needs to capture this historical dimension of the narrative of US imperialism (cf. Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?” 832-34). This longer historical narrative […]