The Transpacific in Relation
Anticolonial Solidarities and Feminist Collaboration
Sam Ikehara, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Erin Suzuki, and Aimee Bahng
Introduction
At its best, the transpacific is a study of relations, and we have titled this syllabus accordingly.1 This group, which formed at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in fall 2020, honors the various social, institutional, and intellectual connections that have brought us into relation as well. The project grows out of commitments to care, collaboration, and access. On the heels of creating a space for thinking about radical care in her coedited special issue of Social Text,2 Hi‘ilei convened the group to consider syllabus production as a form of feminist collaboration, grounded in Black, Indigenous, and woman-of-color thought. On the one hand, we would be helping each other toward what Hobart and Kneese’s special issue introduction describes as “survival strategies for uncertain times.”3 At the same time, a syllabus offered us a way to learn, think, and share labor; a way of producing while simultaneously finding ways to “do less,” as Maile Arvin has so generously urged of us.4
As we were all grappling with pedagogical questions about teaching and learning online amid a global pandemic, Zoom fatigue, and the politics of a/synchronicity across time zones, we took this opportunity to follow the Combahee River Collective’s approach to teaching and learning our way to transformative justice by beginning with the practice of group study.5 We also took as foundational BIPOC feminism’s lessons in working toward solidarity across difference rather than unity driven by assimilation.
The syllabus itself is more suggestive than prescriptive; we leave the specific course requirements and infrastructural scaffolding to you as you tailor to the particularities of your place-based needs and contexts. While a curricular arc guides the movement from module to module, some readings belonging to what we are thinking of as a starter syllabus could easily appear in various segments under different headings. We encourage you to adjust the learning units to the temporality of your term (quarters, semesters, nonacademic time) as well as the particularities of the locations you inhabit, the students you teach, and the needs of your communities. Along these lines, the syllabus concludes with a module designed to highlight on-the-ground activist work as it responds to the exigencies of the moment. Module 12 is less of a module than a garnering of resources. We hope your version of the class will use this final section as a way to open the course onto the particular set of relations that your learning environment carries by adapting, editing, and adding links to movements, initiatives, and daily practices that are currently building alternative structures of accountability and better relations with the planet.
This ever-evolving, open-ended project has several related goals. First, we hope to teach ourselves and each other about the knotty shape and stakes of the transpacific, while also offering a way for others to read and think with us. The vast majority of the readings have been chosen for both importance and accessibility. You will find that for each module, we have offered a poem, short story, or another cultural touchstone to serve as a provocation. These intertexts serve not only to provide a consistent referent to think alongside or in tension with, but also to inspire new directions, intervene in, and pose problems to the other readings. In our experience, having a shared cultural text can catalyze discussions that otherwise potentially fall into abstraction and generalization. Tethering more specialized texts to a creative piece can also open a way into the discussion for students with less formal training in an academic field of study. We have also embedded open-access links whenever possible, and we invite you to email us at TranspacificInRelation@gmail.com for full PDFs of the entire syllabus.
Another goal has been to put certain intellectual genealogies of an academic field called transpacific studies into deeper relation with alternative genealogies of the Pacific, as Teresia Teaiwa describes. The syllabus opens with a reflection on some of the debates that have arisen around the term “transpacific” as it has been used across different areas of scholarship. It then moves on to Indigenous critiques of transpacific studies and its uneven relationships to Asian studies, Asian American studies, ocean studies, and Pacific and Oceanic studies. We dedicated the final third of the course to the work of solidarity across differences and the activist struggles against the exigencies of climate change and ongoing militarism in the Pacific. We especially wanted to be attentive to the grassroots movements attempting to grow something different than what the recent centuries of settler colonial extraction and global capitalism have wrought upon the ocean and its peoples.
One final note about the experimental nature of this project: We intend, in the not-too-fantastical future, to teach this syllabus concurrently from our various locations in academe: to bring our classrooms together and to trouble the institutional boundaries of knowledge production altogether. In this spirit, we want to acknowledge that the syllabus is by no means definitive or exhaustive, but rather emerges out of not only our relations to one another, but our relationships to the places that have fed us. Three of us were born and raised in Hawaiʻi, and while Hawai‘i features heavily through our pilina to that place, we are sensitive to critiques that Hawaiʻi cannot and should not be a stand-in for all of the Pacific. We thus invite all those interested and invested in these conversations to build on and stretch this syllabus to continue questioning, challenging, and reimagining the use of “transpacific.”
Transpacific in Relation
Course Description
This syllabus takes seriously the question posed by the editors of this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies: “Why does scholarship employing the term ‘Trans-Pacific’ tend to fly over Oceania, erasing Pacific Islanders while invoking the Pacific?” Drawing on Pacific Islander critiques of Asian American studies, the tensions and conflations embedded in racial and ethnic identity formations, and Oceanic circulations that produce complex cartographies of diaspora and belonging, readings foreground settler colonial and military occupations of the Pacific Islands to engage decolonial queer-feminist thinkers and practice the methodologies that intervene in colonial modes of acquisition and possession. Thematic parts and modules address the political, economic, epistemological, and ecological stakes of the transpacific, raising questions along the way: What are the limits of thinking through the transpacific in relation? What futures can it produce? Attending to engagements with transpacific movements of people and culture, and the entanglements of migrant and Indigenous frameworks, we use these readings to move through the persistence—and at times concurrence—of multiple forms of colonialism that connect Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Assignments
1. Wish You Were Here
First, read: Kosasa, Karen K., and Stan Tomita. “Settler Colonial Postcards.” In Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, edited by Hōkulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, 147–52. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Postcards are a quintessential media for imaging and imagining places, spaces, and relations. Part visual composition, part missive, these communication forms create narratives that are often idealized, and always distilled into what can fit on a single card. In this way, postcards can be analyzed for what they highlight (an illustration, a longing, a snapshot of an experience) and also what they obscure about a place. Who or what is represented? Which perspectives do they center and validate? As Karen K. Kosasa and Stan Tomita succinctly ask: “whose paradise?” Inspired by their contribution to Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (2019), this assignment prompts you to create a postcard that reveals or addresses a truth about the Pacific that is frequently obscured by dominant narratives that tend to envision Oceania as a kind of paradise. This project is an invitation to be “didactic,” as Kosasa and Tomita describe it, leaving nothing encoded, hidden, or swept under a paradisiacal rug. The postcard image can be collaged, illustrated, or edited in whichever way you choose and must be accompanied by a short (one to two paragraph) explanation about what the image subverts or critiques.
2. Felicitous Pairings, Porous Modules
When the collaborators behind this syllabus began to brainstorm a list of assigned readings, we found ourselves in the pleasurable predicament of certain readings landing in multiple modules, to emphasize slightly different aspects to a piece, or to put thinkers into conversation with different interlocutors. This assignment asks you to turn the modules sideways, tugging on various strands of thought so the pattern they form begins to shift. Select three readings (articles, videos, poems, etc.) from at least three different modules and put them into a new module of your own crafting. Describe the rationale behind your module by explaining how you see the pieces working together. Consider their dates of publication, the genealogies of the pieces and their creators, or perhaps the keywords that travel across them. What questions emerge from putting your selections into conversation? Draw from specific examples and direct quotations from each selection in your description of the new module. You may also add a selection from your own gleanings beyond the scope of this class. If you do, be sure to address why. What has the syllabus missed that you wanted to spend time with? Where does your expertise, experience, and independent study overlap with and depart from what has been formulated here?
3. Inheritance (adapted from #GetFreeWrites)
Robin D. G. Kelley once wrote, “All of us, and I mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and even Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our blood lines to all of these continents.”6 Even as not all of us may be of Asia or the Pacific Islands, we all inherit these legacies of colonialism and imperialism in different and uneven ways. We are all differently imbricated in the complex systems of memory that continually demand national security at the expense of genuine security. This assignment is in two parts. First, write a paragraph reflecting on your own inheritance of the histories you have learned about during this course. Second, write a poem that imagines what you want to change going forward and what it is you want to leave for those who will come after you. To begin, you might ask, what do you want to preserve and protect for the future? What needs to change for all life to matter?
Schedule of Readings
Part One: (Anti-)Imperial Legacies, Cartographies, and Genealogies
Module 1: Transpacific Histories
What is the transpacific? How has it come into being, and what are the different ways it has been represented?
Provocation:
Liu, Ken. “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel.” In The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (New York: Saga Press, 2016), 344–62.
Read:
Shigematsu, Setsu, and Keith L. Camacho. “Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv–xlviii.
Chen, Tina. “(The) Transpacific Turns.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee. https://doi
Stillman, Amy Ku‘leialoha. “Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History.” Journal of Asian American Studies 7, no. 3 (October 2004): 241–70. https://doi
Cruz, Denise. “Introduction.” In Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–30.
Module 2: Transpacific Entanglements
What are some of the conflicts and coalitions that transpacific histories have brought into being? What forms do these transpacific entanglements take?
Provocation:
Giles, William Alfred Nu‘utupu. “Prescribed Fire.” Poets & Writers. https://www
Read:
Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian.” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 727–47. https://doi
Gandhi, Evyn Lê Espiritu. “Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.” MELUS 45, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 49–71. https://doi
Teaiwa, Katerina. “South Asia Down Under: Popular Kinship in Oceania.” Cultural Dynamics 19, no. 2–3 (July 2007): 193–232. https://doi
Kim, Joo-Ok. “‘Training Guatemalan Campesinos to Work Like Korean Peasants’: Taxonomies and Temporalities of East Asian Labor Management in Latin America.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 195–216. https://www
Module 3: Transpacific Methodologies
What methods might we use to rethink or revise political and scholarly perceptions of the transpacific? How can we think more critically about what transpacific scholarship can do?
Provocation:
Perez, Craig Santos. “Praise Song for Oceania.” http://craigsantosperez
Read:
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “Introduction.” In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999), 1–19.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “Research Through Imperial Eyes.” In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999), 42–57.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “Colonizing Knowledges.” In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1999), 58–77.
Teaiwa, Teresia. “L(o)osing the Edge.” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 343–57. https://www
Kim, Junyoung. “Asia–Latin America as Method: The Global South Project and the Dislocation of the West.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 97–117. http://doi
Suzuki, Erin, and Aimee Bahng. “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee. https://doi
Part Two: Indigenous Critiques
Module 4: Pacific Worlding
How do the shape, borders, reach, and expanse of the Pacific come to be known?
Provocation:
“Exhibit 4: Bringing the World Back Home.” Maps are Territories, Digital Exhibition. http://territories
Read:
Hauʻofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” In We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 27–40.
Hauʻofa, Epeli. “The Ocean in Us.” In We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 41–59.
Salesa, Damon Ieremia. “The World from Oceania.” In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop (Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2012), 391–404.
Diaz, Vicente M. “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking, and the Re-mapping of Indigeneity.” Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 21–32. https://www
Case, Emalani. “‘Indigenous Crossings: Kahiki and Solidarity.” In Everything Ancient Was Once New (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2021), 34–49.
Module 5: Indigeneity’s Difference
How do Pacific identity formations emerge from and/or respond to transpacific movements?
Provocation:
Velasquez-Manoff, Moises. “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaiʻi.” New York Times, June 18, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/sunday/racism hawaii.html.
Glenn, Akiemi. “Want to Explore Race in Hawaiʻi? Center Those Most Impacted By It.” Akiemi Glenn (blog), July 2, 2019. https://akiemiglenn
Read:
Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “Colonialism in Equality: Hawaiian Sovereignty and the Question of US Civil Rights.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 4 (2008): 635–50. https://doi
Kabutaulaka, Tarcisius. “Re-Presenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian Alter Natives.” The Contemporary Pacific 27, no. 1 (2015): 110–46. https://www
Somerville, Alice Te Punga. “Maori Cowboys, Maori Indians.” American Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2010): 663–85. https://www
Swan, Quito. “Blinded by Bandung? Illuminating West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific.” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 58–81. https://doi
Module 6: Transits and Circulations
What forms of life/nonlife get made and unmade in transit across the Pacific?
Provocation:
Tizon, Alex. “My Family’s Slave.” The Atlantic, June 2017. https://www
Read:
Espiritu, Yén Lê. “Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies: A Transpacific Critique.” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 483–90. https://doi
Teaiwa, Katerina. “Our Sea of Phosphate: The Diaspora of Ocean Island.” In Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations, edited by Charles D. Thompson Jr. (London: Routledge, 2005), 169–91.
Farbotko, Carol. “Wishful Sinking: Disappearing Islands, Climate Refugees, and Cosmopolitan Experimentation.” Asian Pacific Viewpoint 51, no. 1 (2010): 47–60. https://doi
Oberiano, Kristin. “A Pacific Island’s Response to COVID-19: Guam and the Movement Toward Food Sovereignty.” Epicenter: At the Heart of Research and Ideas (blog), June 3, 2020. https://epicenter
Module 7: Archipelagic and Oceanic Affinities
How do global imperial histories shape shared oceanic futures across the Caribbean and the Pacific?
Provocation:
Siagatonu, Terisa. “Meaulli.” All Def Poetry x Da Poetry Lounge. https://www
Read:
Arvin, Maile. “Polynesia is a Project, Not a Place.” In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 1–34.
Shilliam, Robbie. “Deep Relation.” In The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 13–34.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. “Tidalectics: Navigating Repeating Islands.” In Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 1–50. https://english
Teaiwa, Teresia. “Black in the Blue Pacific (For Mohit and Riyad).” Social and Economic Studies 56, no. 1/2 (2007): 1–11. https://www
Part Three: Imagining Otherwise through Solidarity
Module 8: The Circuits of Militarism and Imperialism
How have distinct colonial and imperial projects converged and what contradictions of time, memory, and loss have these convergences created?
Provocation:
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Kathy. “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.” Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (blog), January 25, 2018. https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/new-year-new-monsters-and-new poems/.
Han, Joseph. “Fare.” Joyland Magazine, June 29, 2018. https://joylandmagazine
Read:
Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Noelani. “Indigenous Oceanic Futures: Challenging Settler Colonialisms and Militarization.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 82–102. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429505010-6.
Vicuña Gonzalez, Vernadette. “Introduction: Military-Tourism Partnerships in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines.” In Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–20.
DeLisle, Christine Taitano. “Destination Chamorro Culture: Notes on Realignment, Rebranding, and Post-9/11 Militourism in Guam.” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016): 563–72.
Ginoza, Ayano. “R&R at the Intersection of US and Japanese Dual Empire: Okinawan Women and Decolonizing Militarized Heterosexuality.” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016): 583–91.
Perez, Craig Santos. “Battleship Guam.” The Hawaii Independent, September 5, 2017. https://thehawaiiindependent
Module 9: Abolition and Genuine Security
How can security, safety, and shelter be reimagined in our communities?
Provocation:
Enomoto, Joy. “Where Will You Be? Why Black Lives Matter in the Hawaiian Kingdom.” Ke Kaupu Hehi Ale (blog), February 1, 2017. https://hehiale.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/where-will-you-be-why-black-lives-matter-in the-hawaiian-kingdom/.
“Abolition Isn’t Scary, It’s Essential.” Root Cause Remedies (podcast), January 1, 2021. https://www.rootcauseremedies.com/listen/episode/244dd501/abolition-isnt-scary-its essential.
Read:
Okazawa-Rey, Margo, and Gwyn Kirk, “Maximum Security,” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (2000): 120–32.
Onishi, Yuichiro. “A Politics of Our Time: Reworking Afro-Asian Solidarity in the Wake of George Floyd’s Killing.” UN Margin. Accessed November 1, 2020. https://www.unmargin.org/apoliticsofourtime.
Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Noelani. “Kūʻokoʻa: Independence.” In The Value of Hawaiʻi 3: Hulihia, The Turning, edited by Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Craig Howes, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, and Aiko Yamashiro (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020), 4–8. https://scholarspace
Young, Kalaniopua. “Home-Free and Nothing (…)-Less: A Queer Cosmology of Aloha ‘Āina.” Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 11, no. 1 (2019): 9–21. https://beta
Module 10: Reimagining Settler Colonial Relations
How can settlers renew relations to land in a way that supports Indigenous resurgence?
Provocation:
“Letter: CHamorus’ Have a Right to Self-Determination.” Pacific Daily News, August 22, 2019. https://www.guampdn.com/story/opinion/readers/2019/08/22/letter-chamorus-have right-self-determination/2079612001/.
Tan, Lincoln. “The Battle for Identity: Fijian-Indians Fight to be Recognised as Pasifika, not Asians.” New Zealand Herald, March 15, 2021, https://www
Read:
Garrison, Rebekah. “Settler Responsibility: Respatialising Dissent in ‘America’ Beyond Continental Borders.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 13, no. 2 (September 26, 2019): 56–75. https://doi
Compoc, Kim. “Weaving Our Sovereignties Together: Maximizing Ea for Filipinx and Hawaiians.” Amerasia Journal 45, no. 3 (September 2, 2019): 316–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2019.1715448.
Lyons, Paul. “A Poetics of Relation: Friendships between Oceanians and US Citizens in the Literature of Encounter.” In American Pacificism: Oceania in the US Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2006), 97–121.
Fujikane, Candace. “Introduction: Abundant Cartographies for a Planetary Future.” In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 1–30. https://www
Module 11: Environmental Literacies
How do people take responsibility for and develop relationships to the lands on which they live?
Provocation:
Nālani McDougall, Brandy. “He Mele Aloha no ka Niu.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/89747/he-mele-aloha-no-ka niu.
Read:
Teaiwa, Katerina. “Our Rising Sea of Islands: Pan-Pacific Regionalism in the Age of Climate Change,” Pacific Studies 41, no. 1–2 (2018): 26–54.
Diaz, Vicente M. “No Island Is an Island.” In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie N. Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 90–108.
hoʻomanawanui, kuʻualoha. “‘Ike ‘Āina: Native Hawaiian Culturally Based Indigenous Literacy.” Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 5 (2008): 203–44. https://beta
Chibana, Megumi. “Resurgents Create a Moral Landscape: Indigenous Resurgence and Everyday Practices of Farming in Okinawa.” Humanities 9, no. 4 (December 2020): 135. https://doi
Module 12: Protecting Sacred Sites
This module highlights on-the-ground activist work happening at the time this syllabus was written. This final module invites you to consider how work within Pacific-based communities opens up multiple futures to us all. Use these examples as a jumping-off point, and add sites not yet represented, or organizations, actions, or struggles current to the time of your reading. The Pacific is dynamic and vast, and there will always be more to include.
Provocation:
Revilla, Noʻu. “When You Say Protestors Instead of Protectors.” Anmly, http://anmly.org/ap31/no%CA%BBu-revilla-2/.
Ritte, Walter. “Pōhakuloa: Now That You Know, Do You Care?” July 7, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r10eRMjIRw.
Mackintosh, Lucy. “Why Ihumātao Truly Is a Piece of New Zealand’s Soul.” The Guardian, September 24, 2019. https://www
The Pacific:
350 Pacific Climate Warriors, https://world.350.org/pacificwarriors/
Blue Ocean Law, https://www.blueoceanlaw.com/
Guåhan and the Mariana Islands:
Prutehi Litekyan—Save Ritidian, https://www.facebook.com/saveritidian/
Tåhdong Marianas, https://www.tahdongmarianas.com/
Hawaiʻi:
KAHEA: The Hawaiian Environmental Alliance, http://www.kahea.org/
HULI (Hawaiʻi Unity and Liberation Institute), https://hulinvda
Hawaiʻi Peace and Justice, http://www.wp.hawaiipeaceandjustice.org/
Hui o Nā Wai ʻEhā, https://www
Kaʻohewai, https://www
Oʻahu Water Protectors, https://oahuwaterprotectors
Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi, https://sierraclubhawaii
The Marshall Islands:
Jo-Jikum, https://jojikum.org/
Okinawa:
Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, http://www.genuinesecurity.org/partners/okinawa.html
Ōyama Taanmu Fan Club (JP), https://www
Born and raised on Oʻahu, Sam Ikehara is a PhD candidate in American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is an assistant professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her book Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
Erin Suzuki is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures (Temple University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in MELUS, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Amerasia, and she is currently developing a project on fictional monsters in and around the Pacific.
Aimee Bahng is an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at Pomona College. She is the author of Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018) and a member of the Feminist Editorial Collective behind the Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies volume (New York University Press, 2021). Her second monograph, tentatively titled “Settler Environmentalism and Pacific Resurgence,” is currently under way.
Notes
For a more elaborate discussion of our thoughts on the terms “transpacific” and “Trans-Pacific,” see Erin Suzuki and Aimee Bahng, “The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.877. For more on relationality as it emerges from Indigenous studies, see Dian Million, “‘We Are the Land, and the Land Is Us’: Indigenous Land, Lives, and Embodied Ecologies in the Twenty-First Century,” in Racial Ecologies, ed. Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 19–33; Candace Fujikane, “Introduction: Abundant Cartographies for a Planetary Future,” in Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 1–30.
Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067.
Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care,” 1.
Maile Arvin, “CESA 2018 Plenary Talk,” Critical Ethnic Studies (blog), Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, September 17, 2018, http://www
.criticalethnicstudiesjournal .org/blog/2018/9/17/cesa -2018 -plenary -talk -by -maile -arvin. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed., ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 217.
Robin D. G. Kelley, “The People in Me,” ColorLines Magazine 1, no. 3 (1999).