"A great companion to the best books on imperialism and its multiple genres as well as a smart and useful guide to reading contemporary cultural texts that subversively persist in enabling alternative renditions of U.S. multiculturalism."
--Rick Bonus, author of Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space
"[Legitimizing Empire's] successful location of both mainstream American culture and the subcultures examined in the context of historic American imperialism (and ongoing neo-imperialism) is impressive and thought provoking. It very effectively challenges enduring narratives of "benevolent assimilation" in the history of American imperialism, and of multiculturalism as retrospectively justifying such US exceptionalism."--H-Empire
"Legitimizing Empire offers fresh insights into the continuities and divergences of Philippine and Puerto Rican histories in ways that reveal the seemingly monolithic but uneven deployment of U.S. empire. This work is profoundly instructive both in terms of its illuminating comparative framework which, in itself, approximates so well a non-exceptionalist rendition of U.S. imperial history, but also in its calculated engagement with cultural production as a critique of empire emanating from multiple locations--from the nations/territories themselves and in places where diasporic populations are situated. A great companion to the best books on imperialism and its multiple genres as well as a smart and useful guide to reading contemporary cultural texts that subversively persist in enabling alternative renditions of U.S. multiculturalism."--Rick Bonus, author of Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space