In The Abusable Past’s latest installment of “What We’re Reading,” Associate Professor of Design and American Studies Javier Arbona-Homar has a conversation with Emily Mitchell-Eaton to discuss their recently released books.

Arbona-Homar’s Explosivity: Following What Remains (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and Mitchell-Eaton’s New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) both follow the complex relationships between colonialism, mobility, and memory. In their wide-ranging conversation, they bring readers along with them in their research in unlikely places. They explain what it’s like to study empire in these spaces and how we need to think about the materiality of decolonial politics. 

Read the conversation here.