Race and Indigeneity in Pacific Islands and Settler Colonial Studies

Eiichiro Azuma and Greg Dvorak gift us with two important and richly researched books that deepen our understanding of how settler colonialism operates as a connective mechanism tying Japanese and US imperialisms. My response applies a concept from one study to the other; both questions stem from my interest in Blackness and the African diaspora in the Pacific, or the Black Pacific.

Eiichiro: how would a focus on indigeneity, including Indigenous voices and lives—a particular strength of Dvorak’s Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands—illuminate the effects of your articulation of “adaptive settler colonialism?”

Greg: How would a more encompassing analysis of race, highlighted in Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, expand our understanding of the Marshallese and their experiences in and beyond Micronesia?

Both books engage the interactive, overlapping, and distinct imperial interests and settler practices of Japan and the United States. They detail the diversity within and hierarchies among racialized, national, and Indigenous populations. Azuma and Dvorak theorize how global processes and individual actors come together to reveal the mechanics of domination, displacement, and resistance. Azuma offers a top-down approach in his study of Japan’s uneven success in implementing imperial ambitions though their settlements of “new Japans” in regions spanning North and South America, the Pacific, and other parts of Asia.1 Dvorak pins his attention to Kwajalein, a main islet of the Marshall Islands in the Micronesian region of the Pacific, to show how its people, reef, land, and missile-illuminated skies have been cumulatively affected by Japanese, US, and Marshallese exchanges.

First, Azuma.

With great detail, Azuma bridges the “conventional[ly] dichotomized ideas about Japanese colonial history and Japanese American history.”2 Through four parts, each with two chapters, Azuma illustrates Japanese “adaptive” attempts at settler colonial rule in sites including the United States, Hawai‘i, Mexico, Brazil, Manchuria, and Micronesia. “Adaptive settler colonialism” highlights how Japanese imperialism contested, was informed by, and aligned with US settler practices. Within the US context, for example, Japanese Americans formulated their own settler colonial politics in reaction to the White supremacist underpinning of US settler colonialism that included anti-Asian nativism and exclusion.

Azuma reveals how two strains of race ideology informed Japanese migrants’ settler ambitions. First, Japan created a vision of a borderless empire based on the idea of Japanese exceptionalism and pride as the result of being a part of the superior “diasporic Yamato race.”3 Japaneseness, thus, was conveyed through blood rather than requiring a shared nation and culture. Second, White exclusionists’ conceptions of the inferiority of Asians, including the Japanese, informed Japanese imperialists’ adaptations to their implementation of settlements. Thus, Japanese imperialists attempted to align themselves alongside Whites as a superior race while implementing a more “polite racism” (drawing from Takashi Fujitani’s concept) rooted in, among other practices, the benevolent assimilation of Indigenous people in, for example, Guatemala, rather than the violent exclusion experienced by Japanese immigrants in California.4

I am especially interested in hearing more about the ideologies and practices that Japanese Americans adopted from their encounters in the United States, especially with Native Americans and Black people, and what they took from White supremacist notions that were employed to justify and enact settler colonialism. Azuma reveals how some Japanese men, like San Francisco–based Nagasawa, saw the domination of Native Hawaiians as inevitable on account of their cultural “deficiency” (they were viewed as “lazy” natives who preferred to dance).5 Did the Japanese also adapt the technologies of surveillance, lynching, and separation that structured US Black/White relations? Did the Japanese export or reject White racist violence toward Black people as a way to deal with Native populations?

In addition to hearing more about how the relationality, dynamics, and technologies of hierarchy worked among a greater number of racialized groups in the United States, what was the effect of Japan’s colonialism on Indigenous groups? What would it mean for Azuma to engage Indigenous histories and archives? How is settler colonialism a dialogic with the process of domination? This relative silence about the impacts of settler colonialism on existing communities highlights how Indigeneity disappears in works that focus on settlers. Scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies have critiqued settler colonial studies for centering White settlers, which serves to erase Indigenous people and therefore maintain settler colonialism. One gets a sense of the vast and ambitious infrastructure of Japanese imperialism through uneven attempts at settler colonialism; one does not get a sense of what this means for and to the Indigenous people who were displaced, dispossessed of their homes, and killed. What happens when we decenter Whiteness and expand our attention beyond the colonizers in an analysis of settler colonialism? Japanese settler colonialism is, of course, the topic of In Search of Our Frontier, but can there be an analysis of settler colonialism without an analysis of the displaced and resistant Indigenous residents?

Now, I turn to Dvorak.

While Azuma treats us to a remarkable view of Japan’s imperial ambitions across a great portion of the globe, Dvorak offers a love letter to his former home, zeroing in on one part of the Pacific that is marginalized even in studies of Oceania. Coral and Concrete offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Japanese and American imperial ambitions over the Marshall Islands, an atoll in Micronesia, by centering the worldviews of the Marshallese who have resisted these waves of occupation. He focuses on two islets, Kwajalein and Ebeye, that reflect the contrasting effect of US imperialism on American settlers and Indigenous Ri-Kuwajleen. The United States developed Kwajalein, where Dvorak lived until he was seven (his father was an engineer for a defense firm), into a simulacrum of a wealthy American “suburb” that houses US contractors and military personnel who help manage the US military apparatus in the region. To clear the land, Americans paved over reminders of the Japanese presence while displacing Ri-Kuwajleen to Ebeye—a crowded nearby islet lacking infrastructure and adequate housing. As one Ri-Kuwajleen landowner sums, “Kwajalein is perfect for the Americans, and Ebeye is like the ghetto.”6

Dvorak’s place-based analysis shatters the layers of “concrete,” or the hegemonic and flattening narratives of history developed by the United States, to expose the “deep time” of coral that are like “seeds that travel from afar.”7 Coral and concrete are evocative metaphors for the dynamism of the area, particularly as we see how individuals become animated “participants in the drama of history.”8 Dvorak draws from interviews, photographs, songs, and military history to reveal how the Marshallese who live/d in this atoll remember and resist successive colonialisms. The geography, sand, sounds, and even nostalgic smell of the atoll’s landscape, waterscape, and airscape provide texture; the author recalls the comingling of hot dogs, salt spray, and jet fuel.9

Dvorak’s background as a “Kwaj kid” informs his approach. He analyzes how the United States paves over historical memory by their attempted burial of the Japanese imperial past in the atoll. We sense a haunting presence of Japanese soldiers’ remains alongside the bones of Okinawan and Korean workers who suffered ignominious deaths during the Japanese colonial era. Dvorak’s commitment is to dig beneath these layered histories to reach the coral, all the while foregrounding the voices of the Marshallese who offer complex and multivocal responses to occupation. What emerges when we center a place and its residents over time are the voices of its multiple people (like coral polyps) and evidence of the blasted but surviving reef under the concrete. This rendering of how the atoll has been (literally) reshaped by competing imperialisms gives a grounded “deep time” sense of these actors’ ties to the past and how this place of “now-here” (the title of the book’s prelude) is globally situated.

Dvorak’s book is not just dialogic, placing coterminous actors in conversation; it is also layered.10 The agents of US empire had to navigate the buried reminders of former Japanese imperial violence; Marshallese families contend with each of these invasions. Establishing a US military presence required Americans to pour concrete, nicely mined by the author for its metaphoric possibilities. Coral is not only a living material, but a historical entity, as Dvorak explains that it is a matter that is formed from the movement of living things and ideas from across the globe. In his hopeful narrative, coral is stronger than concrete, it “grows back, reclaiming the concrete and breaking through into the sunlight, making the atoll whole again.”11 The primacy of Marshallese perspectives, especially the Ri-Kuwajleen, and the honor and care that Dvorak presents is key for understanding this as a life-sustaining site that exists beyond, despite, and after US empire.

While Dvorak does not use the paradigm of settler colonialism, this book is about settlement, imperialism, and Indigenous displacement and resistance. It relates the importance of belonging, kin networks (fictive and otherwise), and commitments to place. To this end, it would be helpful to read more about how these various imperial and Indigenous communities were also crosscut by global and local notions of race. Dvorak presents evidence of the troubling ways that Micronesia has sedimented itself in the memories of Japanese in Japan: a popular prewar Japanese song, “Shūchō no Musume” (“The Chieftain’s Daughter”) recalls the Japanese engagement with Micronesia and its “exotic” natives (the topic of chapter 3). Dvorak analyzes the racial and gendered meanings of “Pacific desires” expressed through this Japanese song and its blackface performances.12

Are there instances in which other racial ideologies of Blackness affected by the relations among US, Marshallese, and Japanese residents? I wonder if the Marshallese conceive themselves as having a relationship to members of the African diaspora (recall the use of the racialized term “ghetto”), and if they expressed other Indigenous notions of race and of Blackness? In addition to ideologies of Blackness, were there any Black people—soldiers or civilians, or perhaps their children—in the atoll?13 What would it mean for us to learn more about how White and Japanese imperialists’ ideas about Blackness and the presence of African-descended people shape dynamics in the Marshall Islands? My sense is that while the presence of Black people, and especially African American men through the US military, may have been small, the ideologies of Blackness must have informed both Japanese and American approaches to Marshall Islanders. Accounting for global ideologies of Blackness in the Pacific and especially the presence of members of the African diaspora would expand our understanding of triangulated relations among Japanese–Marshallese–(White) Americans.

This is a key site in the study of the Black Pacific even though Europeans had placed the Marshall Islands within the region they saw as being filled with “tiny islands”—Micronesia—and not Melanesia (a word referring to the color of its residents) or Polynesia (referring to its many islands). Yet, as I reveal in my ethnography of Black residents in Hawai‘i, Micronesians in the Hawaiian Islands—refugees of nuclear testing, militarism, and climate change—have consistently faced anti-Black racism.14 Micronesians have recounted being called antiBlack epithets by other Hawaiʻi residents, who apply notions of Black inferiority to Micronesians and call them “monkeys.” Micronesians in Hawaiʻi have also face heightened state and police violence: in April 2021, Honolulu police officer Geoffrey Thom fatally shot a sixteen-year-old Chuuk boy, Iremamber Sykap, with ten bullets from behind. Thus, the colonial violence faced by Marshallese occurs not just in Micronesia but is sustained in diaspora. While this is not the focus of Dvorak’s place-based study, Coral and Concrete provides foundational work upon which we can build in this direction.

Eiichiro Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier offers an expansive and ambitious global study of how ordinary Japanese become agents of empire, adapting and innovating existing forms of settler colonialism across Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Greg Dvorak presents a deep excavation beneath the concrete, offering a rich ethnographic analysis of how Marshallese navigated and contested waves of imperial occupation over time. Together, these books have much to contribute to critical ethnic studies by providing a racial analysis of settler colonialism and the dialogics of imperial and Indigenous interests.

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).