PositiveThe BafflerIn How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr explains how mainlanders forgot to care about Puerto Rico and the other not-quite states our country has controlled since its earliest days. The book is not about any particular person, place, or event. It’s about how people think and don’t think. Immerwahr directs attention to the forces that have made us oblivious, preventing a moral accounting with empire and its animating racism ... Immerwahr wants us to look, and his highlight reel of U.S. empire is worth watching. His main concern is not the metaphorical empire of United Fruit and kimchi Big Macs but empire in crystalline form: spaces beyond borders, which the United States bought, conquered, annexed, and ruled ... Herein lies one of Immerwahr’s indispensable contributions. Of necessity, a lot of historical detail is absent from his book, but he takes time for this critical point: ambiguity is power. By calling a place an appurtenance or territory rather than a state, the federal government arrogated to itself undemocratic authority over the people who lived there—people to whom it would never be accountable unless it decided otherwise ...
