Center-to-Center Relationalities: Diasporas and Dispersals

During a roundtable discussion at the 2021 American Studies Association conference focused on the topic of this special issue, Native Hawaiian scholar Hiʻilei Hobart expressed what she termed “diasporic grief” to name the feeling of loss and mourning experienced by Pacific Islanders who no longer live in their islands. She recognized that this sense of loss is particularly significant for members of Pacific Island diasporas who are forced to migrate and may not find it easy to return. This insight offered by Hobart, one of the authors of the syllabus for this issue, connects mourning and loss to the themes of migration and displacement that are overwhelmingly present in Trans-Pacific studies and in the articles in this journal issue.

As opposed to a celebration of movement and cosmopolitanism present in US foreign policy strategies, such as Hilary Clinton’s Pacific Pivot and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, all the articles demand that we reckon with dispersal as a structuring reality defining the lives of so many people with connections to Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. Some Pacific Islanders may have chosen to move within the “Ocean of Islands,” while colonial plantation economies, militarism, nuclear testing, climate change, and economic precarity have also forcibly displaced Pasifika people across Oceania and to North America for centuries. This includes the kidnapping and forced labor of South Sea Islanders through the practice of blackbirding in the nineteenth century, to 20th and 21st movements connected to the development of the Sāmoan football diaspora that places some young men on a vector of migration from Sāmoa to Hawaiʻi and to the continental United States, to the migration of Hawaiʻi residents to the “ninth island” of Las Vegas in search of jobs, affordable housing, and a livable wage.11 Similarly, Asian diasporans, and to a lesser degree members of African and Latino diasporas, have dispersed across Oceania, immigrating willingly and by force, to places like Australia and Fiji, to Hawaiʻi and Guam, as well as across North America.

Diasporic grief and longing exist at the nexus of Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands studies. This conceptual framing enables us to theorize movements across oceans in ways that challenge the binary conception of choice or coercion with regard to mobility. It is not the case that Pacific Islanders, as Indigenous people, stay in place whereas Asians are always only migrants. Our focus on movement also contributes to expanding Native and Indigenous studies in the US, which often centers Native North America, by featuring scholarship on diasporic Indigeneity in the Pacific as well as Asia. The articles, such as those that focus on Indigenous people in Okinawa, remind us of the site-specific iterations of indigeneity and migration. In their special issue of Amerasia Journal on “Indigenous Asias,” Greg Dvorak and Miyume Tanji call attention to how many out-migrants from Asia to the Pacific Islands, “like Uchinanchu from Okinawa (Ryukyu),” are themselves Indigenous peoples.12 The vectors that shape mobility and the bounds of agency overlap, from British colonialism and the coolie trade to American and Japanese settler colonialism and imperialism, both bolstered by economic and military might. How do Indigenous peoples from Asia, such as the Uchinanchu, navigate their Indigenous identities and commitments within their homeland of Japan-dominated Okinawa and when they migrate or are dispersed to the US settler state as well as to places like Cuba, Micronesia, and French-controlled New Caledonia?13 Relatedly, how do diasporic Pacific Islanders maintain Pasifika practices abroad while considering their kuleana (responsibility, duty) to the North American Indigenous places where they reside? What critical ethnic studies concerns account for Indigenous Asians and Pasifika travelers?

Chadwick Allen’s notion of “trans-Indigenous” is central to our conceptualization of relationalities as structured by connections and incommensurabilities in the context of diasporas and dispersals discussed above. In “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why not Studies that are Trans-Indigenous,” Allen critiques how Indigeneity is always imagined as a priori marginalized in transnational American studies and postcolonial studies, and as such is part of a field that needs to be rescued or brought into the center.14 A focus on diaspora and forced migration—of dispersal and people’s maintenance of long-distance “umbilical ties to home,” as one set of authors in our collection characterizes it—as a locus for a shared historical condition may enable a theorization of center-to-center transpacific and Pacific Islander relationalities. The insistence on centeredness invests in local and site-specific Oceanic and Asian histories, cultures, geographies, and concerns, even as those specificities become globally resituated with attention to the connectedness among numerous centers. Oceania through this lens may be historicized simultaneously as an “Indigenous site of fluid travel and exchange” and a locus of military domination by settler nation-states including Japan and the United States compelling migrations and displacements of multiply situated bodies and subjects.15 This encourages a continued focus on roots and routes explicated by a legacy of scholars, including James Clifford, Vicente Diaz, and Teresia Teaiwa.

It is not so much that Trans-Pacific studies must center the Pacific or that Pacific Islands studies must center Asia as objects or populations of analyses. Rather, the pieces in this issue demonstrate how to breach impasses by beginning with framework of multiple centers, especially as they are displaced or otherwise made marginal. To make sense of the way that Pacific Islanders are both rooted and routed/cosmopolitan, Sāmoan poet Albert Wendt turned to the term vā: “Vā is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.”16 Wendt’s articulation of vā speaks to how Native Pacific Islander epistemologies map the ocean as a place with history and relationality, not an empty expanse bypassed by time.

Center-to-center relationalities that privilege locally situated knowledge and the cultivation of “space that relates” (Wendt) is fundamental to the feminist solidarities and collaborations in and across Oceania and Asia.17 Organizing against the hegemony of the liberal nation-state has been central to feminist solidarities. Gender-based violence, including rape and sex trafficking, have been strategies of both military domination and nation formation. Nation-states across Asia in different ways benefit from or challenge US hegemony in Asia by treating the Pacific Ocean and its islands as sites to carve up and incorporate into their national reach for new markets and to broaden their spheres of influence. We highlight feminist solidarities since so much of the organizing around demilitarization and decolonization across Oceania and Asia, are led by women contesting patriarchy.18 Speaking of women at the helm of activist movements, from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement to the US civil rights movement, Haunani-Kay Trask summarized: “The reality is simply that women are there, where the action is, where the people live, where the nation resides.”19 Feminist solidarities in this context work to create lateral and intergenerational networks for liberation from patriarchal and nationalist military domination, and seek to highlight, as Wendt puts it, “space that is context.”

We feature a collaborative engagement with these same themes of diaspora, connection, and individual relation to multiple centers in the group discussion by Juliann Anesi, Alfred Flores, Brandon Reilly, Christen Sasaki, Kēhualani Vaughn, and Joyce Pualani Warren. Co-authoring “(Re)centering Pacific Islanders in Trans-Pacific Studies: Transdisciplinary Dialogue, Critique, and Reflections from the Diaspora Pacific,” they feature talanoa, a term used across Oceania to feature storytelling as a method of connectivity. They discuss how storytelling and dialogue maintain diasporic relationality to their islands. Healing practices for diasporic grief and loss include storytelling and the reconstruction of memories, especially of stories that are verboten or made dangerous to retell. By “telling and unraveling,” off-island Pacific Islanders and migrants from the Pacific cocreate knowledge and maintain their connections to home and their communities, developing center-to-center relationalities as members of Pacific and Asian diasporas who wish to also consider their relationship to Native North America.

Feminist Solidarities

Feminist solidarities and alliances, particularly those concerned with demilitarizing the Asia-Pacific region, contend with understanding what questions, histories, and memories have been left out of family stories, state narratives, gendered expectations, myths, and knowledge production. One of the strategies of colonial domination is to destroy local archives, rename and resignify existing cultural symbols, and enforce forgetting in order to fragment and distort the historical record. In their groundbreaking collaboration, Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (2010), Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho draw on feminist Asian/American and Pacific Islander scholarship to address how the Pacific Ocean has been feminized as requiring rescue to legitimate the treatment of the region “as an open frontier to be crossed, domesticated, occupied, and settled.”20 This gendered mode of conquest is simultaneously regional and site specific. We see this explicitly in the long history of US and European nuclearism in Oceania and Asia manifest through nuclear bomb attacks, nuclear testing, and legacies of nuclear fallout, addressed in Rebecca Hogue’s essay in this issue. The impact of this nuclear holocaust connects Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the Marshall Islands, Christmas Island, and Johnston Island, among others, even as the rationale used in the nuclear attacks and their uneven effects are specific to each location.

Contending with state-enforced forgetting involves deep “reencounters with memories,” a recovery process that challenges gendered power dynamics in layered ways. Critical militarization studies scholar Crystal Baik theorizes “reencounters” to argue that one of the ways that past and ongoing state violence and military domination exerts control is by willing itself invisible as it is refashioned into the normal and routine. She gives the example of the budae-jjigae, a popular Korean spicy stew that is meant to be shared with a large group.21 It is a portmanteau of familiar Korean food mixed with American processed items like Spam and sliced cheese with origins in the US military occupation of Korea in the 1950s as starving Koreans “scavenged military bases for leftovers, excising Spam and other processed meat from heaps of garbage.”22 Becoming quotidian, and, as with the example of the budae-jjigae, communal and sometimes nurturing, objects or processes that promote reencounters with systems of domination may not only challenge state-level structures, but also force shifts in intimate and familial gender dynamics.

In her contribution to our special issue, Okinawan studies scholar Ayano Ginoza theorizes “archipelagic feminism” as a spatial and temporal concept that accounts for the overlapping and historically linked processes of gender-based violence in Okinawa that she connects to Japanese and American military empires in Asia and the Pacific. In “Archipelagic Feminisms: Critical Interventions into the Gendered Coloniality of Okinawa,” Ginoza conceives of archipelagic feminisms as an island-based feminist research method informed by “women’s and girl’s memories of and mobilizations against sexual violence.” As with the work of the IWNAM featured in their political education document, Ginoza’s theory offers a conjunctive method that vivifies the past and articulates connective tissues across disparate spaces: the re-memories and oral histories of women and girls who suffered US military–perpetrated gendered violence in Okinawa are connected to the experiences of “comfort women” in Okinawa and across the Japanese empire.

Kristin Oberiano and Josephine Faith Ong address how transformative and decolonial feminist solidarities toward demilitarization require intergenerational and Native/migrant alliances in their article “Envisioning Ina’famaolek Solidarities: The Importance of CHamoru-Filipino Mutual Relations for a Decolonized Guåhan.” They offer a deep historical perspective on Filipino-CHamoru solidarities briefly referenced in Craig Santos Perez’s poetic piece with which we opened this essay. By turning to ina’famaolek, which they define as “performing what is good and right for the community, with connotations of balance and harmony,” Oberiano and Ong offer a close engagement with the on-the-ground work of Filipinos for Guåhan. While the Guam-based group is relatively new, the organization draws on generations of knowledge and interpersonal relationship building across colonially constructed group divides.

Another theoretical contribution we would like to take time to consider is the conception of “umbilical connections to various places” articulated by Anesi, Flores, Reilly, Sasaki, Vaughn, and Warren, who consider the positions of Pacific Islanders in the diaspora. We see how this concept furthers an analysis of feminist alliances, connecting them to dispersals and diasporas. Denaturalizing kinship is central to feminist interventions into normative heteropatriarchy. Umbilical ties expressed here center the mother figure in biological and familial connections by invoking the scene of birth. However, while the umbilical cord feeds the fetus (although it may also kill the fetus), after birth the cord must be cut. To refer to umbilical ties is to bring up what Jacques Lacan would describe as an imagined moment of plenitude that defines a utopic symbolic order before the introduction of the real. In the context of a diasporic negotiation with disconnection and feelings of illegitimacy and grief as we’ve been discussing, the invocation of umbilical connections denaturalizes physical connectedness as the only way to belong. In this context, “umbilical tie” for us upholds feminist and Indigenous conceptions of land not as something to be conquered and owned, but as that which births and sustains us and with which we are in relation.23

A further feminist intervention through the figure of the mother appears in Rebecca Hogue’s essay, “Oceans, Radiations, and Monsters,” Ryan Buyco’s translation of Sakiyama Asao’s short story “Davao Pilgrimage,” and Anaïs Maurer’s “Bonded by the Bomb: Asian-Oceanian Alliances against French Nuclear Tests.” Their turn to the monstrous, irradiated, and melancholic mothers thematize the potentially transgressive role that denaturalizing gender norms can play in decolonizing discourses and movements. Hogue’s reading of film and performance addresses the dual form of the feminine monstrous in the aftermath of nuclear detonations and testing in Japan and the Pacific. She analyzes Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of the term “rehabilitation” as a form of empathy, as when the poet states: “I realized that in trying to rehabilitate the mejenkwaad, in trying to envision this character as not just a demon, but as a tortured individual, to humanize her in a sense, I was actually trying to rehabilitate myself.”24

Applying Ginoza’s theory of archipelagic feminisms, we see how nuclear fallout crosses the various island nations and imperial powers in the Pacific, linking Japan and Okinawa (the focus of Ginoza’s work) to the Marshall Islands and Hawai‘i (examined by Hogue) and resonant in the literature from Tahiti (discussed by Anaïs Maurer). French studies scholar Maurer, whose contribution extends the reach of Pacific Islands studies to the French-speaking Pacific, analyzes a story in which a character’s death is the result of nuclear testing. Maurer’s anticolonial feminist reading highlights how the colonial trope of the sexually available Indigenous Tahitian woman is replaced in both Mā’ohi and Hakka literature by a new leitmotif: women of all races suffering from radiation-induced cancers. Maurer’s contribution allows us to connect legacies of French imperialism alongside the more studied US and Japanese imperial entanglements through the lens of nuclear humanism.

For Ryan Buyco, who translated an Okinawan short story, the violence of World War II reverberates and mutates between generations, as a mother’s melancholia is inherited by the son but shapeshifts into a simmering violence that infiltrates all aspects of the story. The narrative is set in the 1990s and follows two Okinawan men, Haruo and Machida, who travel to the Philippines to pay respects to their family members who died there during the World War II era. Haruo’s mother never stopped mourning for her daughter who went missing in the Philippines at the war’s end. Her husband was killed while in battle as a soldier conscripted for the Japanese. After Japanese forces were defeated, Haruo, his mother, and his one-year-old sister were fleeing from US soldiers when the baby girl went missing. Haruo never stopped believing that the little girl was found and lived on in the Philippines and this haunts him during his memorial trips. The figure of the mother in Asao’s story, as with Maurer and Hogue, is deformed by racialized, gendered, and militarized violence. These scholars together illustrate what ties Trans-Pacific and Pacific Island geographies, concerns, and theories including both the life-taking processes of nuclear testing and the transregional possibilities of rehabilitating the self by recognizing the humanity of those who have been deemed monstrous.

Race in Oceania

Recent work on the Pacific has laid bare how the processes of militarism, colonialism, and patriarchal and nationalist violence are shot through by colonial racial formations. Race informs and disrupts the dynamics of societies across the Pacific, including West Papua, Australia, and Hawai‘i. Europeans, informed by their encounter with Africa, divided this vast Pacific region and its people into a tripartite racial grouping of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia.25 The mode of possession through Whiteness that places Polynesians in a hierarchical position of value articulated by Pacific scholars Maile Arvin, Judy Rohrer, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson goes hand in hand, Nitasha Sharma shows, with global processes of anti-Blackness that denigrate Melanesians and Micronesians for their proximity to Blackness. A critical ethnic studies approach foregrounds the resonance of Blackness and its multiple iterations in the Pacific.

Indigenous Pacific Islanders had their own positive conceptions of Blackness. For instance, Pō is a Hawaiian concept rich with meanings, including its reference to “the generative, boundless blackness that began the world,” discussed in the work of contributor Joyce Pualani Warren.26 Blackness emerges in several parts of this special issue, but, with the exception of our featured interview with Dr. Akiemi Glenn, not in ways adequate for understanding the central role and presence of African-descended people in and across the Pacific. The contributions gesture to the ways that multiple meanings of Blackness—Indigenous and imported—contest and inform one another. We take the opportunity of this introduction to incorporate an understanding of the Black Pacific by centering Indigenous concepts of darkness and difference. Doing so in the Pacific and Asian contexts expands US-centric and colonial ideas about Blackness, marking a contribution of Afro-Asian studies and the Black Pacific to existing studies of the Black Atlantic.

We approached Critical Ethnic Studies for this special issue precisely because we wanted to highlight the centrality of race in Asia and the Pacific. While Pacific Islands studies tends to highlight indigeneity and the Native/settler binary as central paradigms of analysis, Trans-Pacific studies expounds on migration and militarism, unevenly interrogating the association of racial formation as something that is unique to the United States, with Japan scholars Takashi Fujitani and Eiichiro Azuma being among notable exceptions.27 Here we emphasize how a deeper engagement with race, and in particular Blackness, in these fields can offer a stronger explanatory analysis of structural power dynamics in these regions and among the various populations that traverse and live within them. Central to our theoretical ambitions is our desire to illustrate the meanings of Blackness in the Pacific that emerge from the intersection of imperialism and settler colonialism, as well as movements for sovereignty and demilitarism in the Asia-Pacific region.

Our interview with Dr. Akiemi Glenn, executive director of the Pōpolo Project, an organization that documents Black life in Hawaiʻi, provides an analysis of White supremacy, indigeneity, and settler colonialism by centering Black residents in Hawai‘i. The Pōpolo Project engages issues relevant to both Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands studies, such as when Glenn reminds us that “Black people are always indigenous in the Pacific.” This refers to concepts of Blackness emerging from the Pacific, such as the idea of the esteem or “mana” associated with darkness. Black indigeneity also points to the presence of Black Pacific Islanders, including West Papuans, who may identify as Black and have rallied around the movement for Black lives in their struggles against Indonesian colonial oppression.28 Glenn’s statement can also be read as asserting that African-descended people, who hail from the birthplace of humankind, are Indigenous around the world.

Glenn is trained as a Pacific linguist and is particularly attuned to the meaning of language in asserting belonging. In our interview, she discusses the current reclamation of the Hawaiian term “pōpolo” by herself and fellow Black Hawaiʻi residents as a nonderogatory word. Pōpolo is a nightshade plant with dark berries that have been used to describe Black people, often with negative connotations. Glenn highlights the impact of imported colonial racial science when she explains that “there are no bad words in Polynesian languages that match those kinds of pejorative words in the European context.” By unpacking how people of the Pacific adopted European racial taxonomies into their languages and how this importation affects Black populations locally, Glenn foregrounds the discourses of anti-Blackness that traverse the Pacific. Her work also reminds us of precolonial Indigenous approaches to darkness and difference that did not align with European racial science. The Pōpolo Project creates important spaces for Black civilian residents across Oceania, including people of African and Pacific Islander descent, to discuss their experiences and needs, as their presence is overshadowed by the much larger population of Black members of the US military stationed across the Pacific.

Thus, we center Blackness in the Pacific in this introduction to complicate the discussions around racial formations occurring in this special issue. This is not only a theoretical and conceptual engagement, but also a process that enables us to recognize the complicated role and long-term presence of Black people in Oceania. They have been part of the military occupation of islands such as Hawaiʻi and therefore contribute to Native dispossession, along with their military presence across Asia. However, members of the African diaspora have also settled and made a home within the Pacific alongside Pacific Islanders for centuries. These populations and places currently marginal to critical ethnic studies illustrate how the processes of militarism, racial formation, and Indigenous cultural resurgence collide and commingle at the intersections of critical ethnic studies, Trans-Pacific studies, and Pacific Islands studies.

How does conceptualizing Blackness in Oceania contribute to the question of what it means to be a settler? Addressing this question requires recognizing the field-shifting role that theorizations of Asian settler colonialism have played in opening political and conceptual space to address the asymmetry of Asian and Pacific Islander relations. Emerging from Haunani-Kay Trask’s foundational account of settlers of color, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura offered an Asian settler colonial analysis to reveal how Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans, have become a part of a political hegemony in Hawai‘i, supporting US military and imperial domination of the Hawaiian Islands.29 Along with Native American and Indigenous studies, such work from the Pacific has encouraged US ethnic studies scholars to address Asian/Indigenous relationalities and take account of Indigenous struggles for sovereignty in the context of settler colonialism. The research across this special issue pays attention to Asian migrants’ positions and politics vis-à-vis Indigenous people and places. In doing so, we also amplify the need to center an analysis of race, including taking account of Black people in the Pacific in the explication of the Native/settler divide.

Hawai‘i-based scholars have theorized Asian settler colonialism to refer to the process by which Asians claim localness, even as elite Asians occupy positions of economic and political power, and in so doing further dispossess Pacific Islanders. Considering the role of Black people in the Pacific in the process of settler colonialism and military occupation ruptures the Native/settler binary and expands the focus on White–Pacific Islander–Asian relations in places discussed in this special issue, including Guam, Hawaiʻi, and Tahiti.30 Are Black people included in Trask’s conception of “settlers of color?” Does it matter if they are island-born civilian locals or soldiers, and therefore agents of US imperialism? A racial analysis of settler colonialism shifts the conversation from individual identity to a structural analysis of power. It reveals that “settler” refers less to one’s status based on racial or ancestral identity, but rather points to one’s relationship to place and engagements with systems (the military, racial capitalism, formal political ties to the United States, real estate) that dispossess people indigenous to that place. We urge scholars reading this issue to heed the call to center an analysis of race including attention to the Black Pacific within studies of both the Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands and to consider the triangulation of Black–Pacific Islander–Asian relationalities.

Contributions to this issue focus on Asian–Pacific Islander relations that address and exceed both the paradigm of Asian settler colonialism and the categories on which it depends. These studies remind us how processes of domination and resistance connect and reformulate communities across geographic, Indigenous, and racial boundaries, thereby calling into question the very nature—and purpose—of such divisive groupings. If Asians are considered “migrants,” “settlers,” “arrivants,” and “settler allies” in work that considers the relationship of Asian populations with groups indigenous to the places they have settled, the contributions here analyze how people forge communities by considering their relationship across groups (Native/settler) and places (Japan, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands, Guam, Tahiti, the Philippines). What emerges in these studies are portraits of expansive and cross-regional movements for liberation, including archipelagic feminism, demilitarism, and Asian support for Native self-determination. Ong and Oberiano’s contribution “Envisioning Inafa’maolek Solidarities,” as well as Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s “Indigenous Soldiering: CHamoru, Māori, and Hmong Narratives of the Trans-Pacific Vietnam War,” demonstrate how Guam has long been a complex location for Asian displacement as well as Asian settler colonialism, both of which consort with US military occupation of the island nation. Gandhi charts gendered practices of Indigenous soldiering among Hmong, Māori, and CHamoru families. Her focus on Indigenous soldiering reveals entanglements of militarism with colonialism—the same processes, along with racism, that have led to the disproportionate enlistment of Black men and women in the US military—that link these multiple sites and soldiers. What emerges is the necessity of demilitarism coupled not only with an end to settler colonialism, but also antiracism.

Asian indigeneities are highlighted in Ryan Buyco’s translation of Okinawan author Sakiyama Asao’s “Davao Pilgrimage,” which illustrates the unresolved violence of World War II. Our book forum featuring the recent publications of Eiichiro Azuma and Greg Dvorak illustrates this as a war of US and Japanese competing imperialisms and settler ambitions that ravaged Asia and the Pacific. Powerfully, Buyco’s translation, along with Azuma’s and Dvorak’s books, illustrate how this was not just a war between nation-states and empires, but also a battle to eradicate Indigenous resistance. In “Davao Pilgrimage,” through one man’s search for his kin, the reader comes to learn of the fatal ways that war circumscribes a mother’s choices and may remind readers of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.31 Buyco’s contribution demonstrates the relationality between the settler, who displaces and occupies, with the forced displacement of the migrants and indigene living in the diaspora.

Another focus of the articles—people of mixed ancestry, especially those who are Asian and Pacific Islander—additionally highlights how individuals cannot be contained within the colonial categories of race or binary formations like Native and settler. Joyce Pualani Warren’s testimony as a Black Kanaka links to Anaïs Maurer’s literary protagonists who are “Demi” or mixed Mā’ohi (Indigenous to Tahiti) and Hakka Chinese, as well as the CHamoru/Filipino families in Guåhan (Guam) discussed by Oberiano and Ong. Dominant categories of analysis—“Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” “migrant,” “settler,” and “Native”—have not caught up with on-the-ground realities and shared politics that complicate clean and neat demarcations. Kinship and intimate bonds across groups can translate not just to shared biological ties, but also to shared political visions.

Our special issue features work that critique global systems of domination without shying away from questions of complicity to reveal the dynamics of Asian and Pacific Islander relationality. Espiritu Gandhi, building on historian Simeon Man’s work, reveals Indigenous soldiering as a complex nexus of complicity, racism, and masculinity that provides no easy answers to the question of who serves US imperial interests.32 Yet, the rise of Filipinos for Guåhan in Oberiano and Ong’s piece reflects how some Filipino activists understand their role as settlers, which becomes central to their support for CHamoru self-determination. This collaborative approach exists alongside the militarized roots of Filipino migration, as they were brought to Guam as exploited laborers by the United States to dispossess CHamorus of their land. Glenn’s interview considers a similar self-reflection on the part of Black residents of Hawai‘i who examine how their presence contributes to Native dispossession, including the crisis of mass houselessness in the Islands. There is no position of innocence.

Theories of Asian settler colonialism and Native sovereignty that have developed in a Pacific context have traveled across North America to reshape the way scholars teach Asian American studies. At the same time, US ethnic studies crosses the Pacific to reveal the racialized dimensions of militarism and colonialism. An intersectional racial and settler colonial lens, in other words, illustrates how decolonization, demilitarization, and antiracism are intertwined. This journal issue addresses the limitations of both deeply localized theories and single-population foci that miss systems that affect groups and places across categories and geographies. The contributors reveal how a critical ethnic studies lens, insofar as it calls attention to the entanglements of racial capitalism, pairs with attention to indigeneity (as a concept and by centering Indigenous people) and the urgency of Indigenous sovereignty struggles along with a Trans-Pacific focus on diasporas, anti-imperialisms, and feminisms.

Conclusion

Our special issue spotlights center-to-center relationalities across the Pacific and Asia, revealing diaspora and forced displacement, broadscale feminisms, and race at the nexus of Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands studies. Guam, Tahiti, Okinawa, Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Philippines, the Marshall Islands—these sites and others rest at the center of the scholarship presented in this issue, developing our cartographic education. The syllabus on “The Transpacific in Relation: Anticolonial Solidarities and Feminist Collaboration” offered in this issue curated by Aimee Bahng, Hi‘ilei Hobart, Sam Ikehara, and Erin Suzuki reflects this effort of decentering geographic and group hegemonies while creating new center-to-center relations based on systems that connect Asia and the Pacific and the movements for decolonization and self-determination that arise in response. Their syllabus includes key works from across these fields and illustrates the themes discussed here, including entanglements, Indigenous critique, transits, affinities, genuine security, and solidarity. Readings and innovative assignments encourage us to see how multiple sites are deeply affected by our three key themes.

Contributions to this special issue speak to Asian and Pacific Islander negotiations and vexed and historically informed relations among migrant and Indigenous communities. Through analyses of film, performance, organizations, history, and literature, they illustrate comradeship and shared political visions while reconsidering the impacts of colonialism. They simultaneously point to the tensions that exceed the parameters of academic discourse and the fields designated as Trans-Pacific studies and Pacific Islands studies. Contributions showcase how practices and processes, such as militarism and nuclearism, can lead to pan-oceanic if uneven effects on bodies of water and matter that live near, with, and in the water. Their critical ethnic studies interventions show how matter and beings in Oceania and Asia are variegated and differentially positioned vis-à-vis global systems of power—not just of militarism and nuclearism, but also of patriarchy, extractive capitalism and labor, and land—as they disrupt taxonomies of race, indigeneity, gender, and national belonging.

Jinah Kim is professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian studies at California State University, Northridge. Her scholarship focuses on the American century in Asia, with a focus on the legacies of the Korean War and US military occupation in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019). She is the recipient of the 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities award to support her second book, Against Forgetting: Memory, Care, and Feminist Arts across the Transpacific.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of Black studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Hawai‘i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press, 2021) and Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke University Press, 2010).

Notes

1. Lisa Yoneyama, “Towards a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 481.

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2. See Ty Tengan and Paul Lyons, “Pacific Currents,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015); Erin Suzuki and Aimee Bahng, “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020.

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3. Craig Santos Perez, “The Poetics of Mapping Diaspora, Navigating Culture and Being From,” Doveglion Literary Journal (2011).

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4. Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

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5. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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6. The International Women’s Network Against Militarism, “A Feminist Vision of Genuine Security and Creating a Culture of Life,” April 13, 2021, http://iwnam.org/2021/04/13/a-feminist-vision-of-genuine-security-and-creating-a-culture-of-life/.

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7. Yoneyama, “Towards a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” 481.

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8. Office of Insular Affairs, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Pacific Islander Communities,” March 16, 2021, https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/oia-blog-pacific-islanders-impacted-by-covid19.pdf.

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9. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001).

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10. Yoneyama, “Towards a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” 481. An example of ongoing colonialism and other shared concerns of Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands studies is illustrated in a recent COVID-19–related form of colonial tourism in Guam. In June 2021, Guam launched a “Vaccination and Vacation” campaign to encourage American expats in Asia as well as Asians from neighboring nations to come and spend their travel dollars. While the COVID-19 vaccine is scarce in much of Asia, including the wealthy nations of Japan and Korea, it was easier to acquire in this unincorporated territory of the United States. The tourism board hoped to jump-start its economy that had been nearly decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic and hoped to take advantage of the new travel restrictions to the popular tourist destination of Hawai‘i. Before the pandemic, Japan, followed by Korea and Taiwan, comprised the largest number of tourists to Guam. These countries were encouraged to tour Guam through a waiver of its visa program. For many green card holders (lawful US residents) living in East Asia, the advantages of such a trip were linked to Guam’s legal relationship to the United States: in order for a green card to remain valid, a resident cannot stay outside of the United States for more than one year. Green card holders could thus visit Guam to refresh their resident status. This example highlights how various stakeholders are navigating the pandemic by drawing on and reconfiguring existing colonial relations that cause concern and require close monitoring.

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11. Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007); Lisa Uperesa, Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022).

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12. Greg Dvorak and Miyumi Tanji, eds., “Indigenous Asias,” Amerasia, 41, no. 1 (2017).

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13. Ronald Nakasone, Okinawan Diaspora (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002).

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14. Chadwick Allen, “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why not Studies that are Trans-Indigenous,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 1 (2012).

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15. Allen, “A Transnational Native American Studies?,” 12.

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16. Vā is a Samoan and Tongan term. Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” Span 42–43 (April–October 1996): 15–29, https://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/wendt/tatauing.asp. We are grateful to Lana Lopesi for introducing this concept and term to us. See the work of Lopesi including her thesis “Moana Cosmopolitan Imaginaries,” https://lanalopesi.com/.

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17. Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body.”

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18. Moanike‘ala Akaka, Maxine Kahaulelio, Terrilee Keko‘olani-Raymond, and Loretta Ritte, Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization, ed. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2018).

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19. Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999), 191.

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20. Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, xxxii.

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21. Crystal Baik, Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020). Baik is analyzing a video installation by Ji-Young Yoo titled BooDaeChiGae (2005).

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22. Baik, Reencounters, 3.

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23. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Mishuana Goeman in “Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable,” Hōkūlani Aikau, Maile Arvin, Mishuana Goeman, Scott Morgensen, Frontiers 36, no. 3 (2015).

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24. Rebecca Hogue, “Oceans, Radiations, and Monsters,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (2022).

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25. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i (Duke University Press, 2019); Judy Rohrer, Haoles in Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Nitasha Sharma, Hawai‘i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press, 2021).

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26. Joyce Pualani Warren, “Genealogizing Pō: The Relational Possibilities of Blackness in the Pacific,” ethnic studies review 44, no. 3 (2021).

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27. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (University of California Press, 2011); Eiichiro Azuma, Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (University of California Press, 2019).

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28. Christopher Lundry, “ʻWe Have a Lot of Names Like George Floyd’: Papuan Lives Matter in Comparative Perspective,” in Who Is The Asianist?: The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies, ed. Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling (Columbia University Press, 2022).

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29. Expanding on Haunani-Kay Trask’s analysis of settlers of color, Asian settler colonialism was introduced by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura who guest edited a special issue of Amerasia called “Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i” (Volume 26, Number 2, 2000). Fujikane and Okamura then published this special issue as an edited volume: Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). Dean Saranillio has also written extensively on Asian settler colonialism. Dean Saranillio, “Haunani-Kay Trask and Settler Colonial and Relational Critique: Alternatives to Binary Analyses of Power,” Verge 4, no. 2 (2018); Dean Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 280–94.

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30. Consider Ikyo Day’s introduction of the figure of “alien migrants” to account for the forcible movements of slaves, coolies, and other dispersed people. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

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31. Toni Morrison, Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

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32. Simeon Man, Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonized Pacific (University of California Press, 2018).

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