Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across the American Empire

Abstract

Pacific Islanders seldom figure prominently in discussions of the United States empire, itself a frequently disavowed apparatus of white economic, military, and political supremacy. Whether construed as products of genocidal removal, national amnesia, or political marginalization, Pacific Islanders frequently remain in the fringes of this nation-state. Yet they will play vital roles in the making and unmaking of American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present, prompting scholars to engage these indigenous peoples as having their “own history, not autonomous and separate from the United States, but integral and intersecting, blending local and global connections.” What accounts, then, for the erasure of Pacific Islanders from the historical record, national memory, and political economy of America? What kinds of Pacific Islander interventions—that is to say, indigenous vernaculars for “self” and “other,” “village” and “city,” “land” and “sea” — occurs because of America's colonial presence ...