Response to Eiichiro Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier and Greg Dvorak’s Coral and Concrete

The works of Eiichiro Azuma and Greg Dvorak provide critical insights that shed light on the necessary nuances connecting Trans-Pacific people, ideologies, and practices that have impacted our contemporary understandings of the Pacific, Oceania, and settler colonial flows. Each text compels readers to understand how multiple layers have constructed and reconstructed our understanding of different relations to land, people, movement, and practices that dynamically influence the impact of empire. With each, one must link with the metaphorical and literal concrete that Dvorak positions as a way to make the atoll “lose its complexity and genealogical heritage” for us to reconstruct how people, places, and ideologies helped create and perpetuate notions of overlapping empire building through collective practices, often intersecting with race, militarism, nationhood, and power.1

One of the interesting connections that Azuma and Dvorak highlight stems from the way cultural superiority and projection ideologies were crucial to the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of American and Japanese control over various lands throughout the Pacific. These spaces, which Dvorak refers to as strategic colonies, were crucial to the projection of the Japanese, and later American, settler regimes. However, they also materialized in different manners. From changing the land through agriculture, to creating military outposts as ways to safeguard the empire, or transplanting American suburbia far from its origins, Azuma and Dvorak compel us to understand how these acts build layers that embed and evolve as power, land, and bodies are reconfigured in a given space.

I was intrigued by Azuma’s deployment of adaptive settler colonialism to help explain Japanese American colonial settlers’ overlapping roles as a racialized minority and also a colonial master. This focus helps us understand the experiences of Japanese Americans who migrated to and from North America to other frontiers of Japan’s empire, along with the knowledge and ideologies acquired in the process. Azuma encourages us to recognize the intersections and flows that allow colonialist ideologies and settler colonial logics to establish and refine themselves through the land and subject making that occurred as Japanese Americans migrated from North America to multiple locations from South America to Oceania and Asia. Along with them came experiences of racism in American settler societies, developed through the negative experiences in places such as California and Hawaiʻi that influenced how they placed themselves and the colonies they controlled in this larger, global frontier. This impacted Japanese imperial ideas of modernity and civilization building, one where “they could and did victimize other ‘colored’ people as colonizing settlers by referencing the practice of the US racial empire.”2 This notion of Japanese settler adaptation forces us to rethink how Japanese American experiences impacted the larger discourses surrounding settler colonialism and empire building, one where aspects of Western racisms and settler policies were remixed to fit the Japanese expansion and desires of empire. It also becomes a useful measure to break beyond a binaristic understanding of settler colonialism by understanding the overlapping positionalities and histories present in the actions of settlers of color.

Azuma’s work helps build on and provide context to Dvorak’s discussion of racial and cultural superiority and subject making in Kwajalein during Japanese imperial control. In particular, the discussions surrounding Blackness, primitiveness, and exoticism based on proximity to Marshallese folks expands on the relationship between race and adaptive settler colonialism that highlights the reach of a continentally based racialized order revised for the Marshallese context. While context-specific, Dvorak’s discussion of the song lyrics, “She’s black but in the South Seas, she’s a beauty,” renders eerily similar to the dialogues shared by scholars such as Jennifer Morgan about European explorers’ depictions of African women during the 1800s.3 The latter work collectively highlights a Eurocentric fantasy that establishes a power relation with the Other, one that renders a subject and land as primitive and deviant, in need of transformation into civilization. It was startling to see this connection play out in Kwajalein and through the lyrics that reemphasizes the perceived inferiority of Blackness in a Japanese racial hierarchy. While anthropologist John Russell contends that this is a way to “employ the black Other as a reflexive symbol through which Japanese attempt to deal with their own ambiguous racio-cultural status in a Eurocentric world,” Dvorak’s analysis expands our understanding of how Blackness is deployed for the purpose of legitimizing power by settlers.4

The association of Marshallese to a form of Blackness by Japanese imperialists forces us to question and expand the way we think about Blackness beyond the continental context. How were Japanese definitions of Blackness deployed throughout the Japanese colonies, and how did this serve to not only justify Japanese racial and settler domination, but also their place in relation to Western powers? How did this form of colonial exploitation persist in the interactions that continued with the American military presence? One possible avenue to pursue may further examine the link between these historic, oceanic understandings of Blackness through the lens of overlapping and adaptive settler colonialism as it is imposed on an island Indigenous identity. This can triangulate the lineage of terminology linking Blackness to Indigeneity through European, Japanese, and American colonial efforts, and how their vestiges impact present understandings of identity in Oceania.

I appreciate Azuma and Dvorak for their many insights to further nuance and challenge our understandings of settler regimes and actions as they flow throughout the Pacific and beyond. As I look back on their works, I wonder how we can continue to utilize their various concepts to highlight contemporary discourses and discussions within a transpacific context. How might we use ideas in line with peaceful expansionism and adaptive settler colonialism further to highlight contemporary changes in the way we approach settler colonialism, militarism, land, and sovereignty? How can we also connect these concepts to conversations that highlight the spaces in Asia and throughout the Pacific that were militarized and suburbanized in light of World War II, the Cold War, and subsequent conflicts? How can we also use this to remain critical of settlers of color who also participate in perpetuating continentally and colonial-based logics of land, value, and power? These are crucial to help us understand and shed light on the multiple and contradictory realities that shape our histories and contemporary transpacific experiences.

Ethan Caldwell is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests examine how post–World War II Black-Asian relations and militarism in Okinawa impact Oceanic constructions of race, gender, empire, and Blackness. He is the author of “Demarcating Fences: Power, Settler-Militarism, and the Carving of Urban Futenma” in Streetnotes (2019) and coauthor (with Ruben Enrique Campos III and Roderick N. Labrador) of “‘I’m about to get really f*cking racist’: Racialization, Resistance and the Local in Hawaiʻi” in Social Process in Hawaiʻi (2020).