Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific (original) (raw)
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Introduction, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field
The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration, fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established civilizations and cultures of travel well before European explorers arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The twentieth century, with its various wars fought in and over the Pacific, is only the most recent era to witness military strife and economic competition. While “Asia Pacific” and “Pacific Rim” were late twentieth-century terms that dealt with the importance of the Pacific to the economic, political, and cultural arrangements that span Asia and the Americas, a new term has arisen—the transpacific. In the twenty-first century, U.S. efforts to dominate the ocean are symbolized not only in the “Pacific pivot” of American policy but also the development of a Transpacific Partnership. This partnership brings together a dozen countries—not including China—in a trade pact whose aim is to cement U.S. influence. That pact signals how the transpacific, up to now an academic term, has reached mass consciousness. Recognizing the increasing importance of the transpacific as a word and concept, this anthology proposes a framework for transpacific studies that examines the flows of culture, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. These flows involve Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. The introduction to the anthology by its editors, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, consider the advantages and limitations of models found in Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies for dealing with these flows. The editors argue that transpacific studies can draw from all three in order to provide a critical model for considering the geopolitical struggle over the Pacific, with its attendant possibilities for inequality and exploitation. Transpacific studies also sheds light on the cultural and political movements, artistic works, and ideas that have arisen to contest state, corporate, and military ambitions. In sum, the transpacific as a concept illuminates how flows across the Pacific can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance.
RE-SIGNIFYING " ASIA " IN THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN OF ASIAN/AMERICAN STUDIES
Bringing inter-Asia cultural studies into conversation with Asian American critique, this paper aims to reframe the critical analysis of the scattered hegemonies of US imperialism in articulating the transpacific historical interconnections. Rather than privileging the US as a primary site of investigation and critique, I draw careful attention to the Cold War conditions of inter-Asia migration as an entry point for discussing how the geopolitics of Taiwanese modernity, from the Cold War up to neoliberal globalization, are inextricably linked to Japanese colonialism, US militarism and modernization, and Chinese globalization. To develop my theoretical and historical (re)conceptualization of “Asia” in Asian/American studies, I look at how the migrant narrative of migrant workers in the nonfiction novel Our Stories speaks to the power dynamics of the US Cold War involvement in Asia, neoliberal globalization, and Taiwan subimperialist relations with its neighboring countries. Whereas Asian American cultural critique offers a new analytics to enable a reconceptualization of Asian America without confining it to an identitarian category, inter-Asia cultural studies redirect critical attention to the historical undercurrents of inter-Asia geopolitics that are largely obscured by the dominant knowledge paradigm of the US Cold War politics in the regions of Asia Pacific.
The Pacific Paradox: The Chinese State in Transpacific Interactions
2014
The vast western Pacific has in recent centuries constantly brought shame and suffering to our continent, but today, on the treacherous ocean, enormous wealth seems surging with an irresistible appeal... The western Pacific is becoming the new stage of the world economy. Fate is presenting us with yet another golden opportunity. After centuries' silence, with a long pent-up hunger and thirst, the coastal region, the Chinese Gold Coast, is the first to hurl itself into the Pacific. 1 This was how the television documentary series River Elegy (He Shang), aired in China in 1988 as a climax of the "cultural fever" of the 1980s, portrayed the Pacific. Critical scholars on the other side of the Pacific may see this narrative as part of the dominant American perception about the Pacific. Arif Dirlik and Rob Wilson for example (Arif Dirlik 1998 2 ; Wilson and Dirlik 1996; Wilson 2002 3) made the powerful case that the discourses of "the 1 Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang. 1988. "Chapter Four: The New Epoch" (Xin Jiyuan). In River Elegy. Beijing: China Books and Journals Press (Zhongguo Tubshu Kanxing She). I thank my friend David Kelly for his help with the translation of the paragraph.
Unraveling and Connecting in the Transpacific
Routledge eBooks, 2022
This chapter examines the flow of people, goods, and money in the transpacificfrom East Asia to the US-through an analysis of the narratives and work of two immigrant artists, Yoko Inoue from Japan and Jean Shin from the Republic of Korea, by employing the concepts of both major-and minor-transnationalism. The concept of minor transnationalism, as addressed in the introduction, highlights the horizontal relationship between transmigrants and/or between minoritized peoples (Lionnet and Shih 2005, see the introduction for more detail). In the previous two chapters, Crystal Uchino and Kazuyo Tsuchiya respectively shed light on the empathy, collaboration, and renewed relationships between Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans over the hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) and between Korean immigrants and African Americans in Los Angeles after the 1992 civil disturbances (Uchino, Ch. 8, Tsuchiya, Ch. 9). Minor transnationalism contrasts with major transnationalism in the transpacific, a term which Hoskins and Nguyen use to reference the economic, political, and military contact zones between nation-states, incorporating the power dynamics between them (Nguyen and Hoskins 2014). As Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo discuss (2012, 12, see the introduction for more detail), the US as a masculine presence dominated a feminized Asia while the stronger Asian powers exploited weaker Asian and Pacific countries. US intervention in the Korean and First Indochina Wars stimulated the development of capitalism in the nation-states of East and Southeast Asia, which allied themselves with the Western Bloc, and military cooperation from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, in turn, helped support the Vietnam War (Nguyen and Hoskins 2014, 2-15). The role that the Korean War-era special procurements played in Japan's postwar economic recovery (detailed later in this chapter) provides another example of major transnationalism as well.
The Cultural Logic of Chinese Transnationalism
2006
Introduction When Ernest Gellner published his theory two decades ago just as the discourse on globalization was gaining thrust, he did not anticipate any diminution of either nations or nationalism. Instead, “differences between cultural styles of life and communication, despite a similar economic base, will remain large enough to require separate serving, and hence distinct cultural-political units, whether or not they will be wholly sovereign” (1983:119). Yet, it is difficult to deny certain countervailing evidence to imply that during those same decades, the real and perceived effects of globalization in the Southeast Asian region may have altered the conditions that made nationalism the only form of social organization open to the modern imagination, and that made education the monopoly of the nation-state. The school is the particular institution that theorists of nationalism have long identified as central to the perpetuation of national identity and national unity. Over the ...
Transnational Crossroads: Reimagining Asian America, Latin@ America, and the American Pacific, 2012