Guam and Archipelagic American Studies (original) (raw)

Introduction: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies

Hong Kong University Press: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, 2019

Ever since Shelley Fisher Fishkin popularized the phrase "the transnational turn in American studies, " at the American Studies Association annual convention in Atlanta in 2004, 1 American studies as transnational practice has not only aimed to address what Donald Pease calls its "intelligibility, " 2 which involves methodology, periodization, objects of analysis, and geographical locations, but it has also witnessed a paradigm shift in the field from the transatlantic to the transpacific. 3 If the transatlantic entails Euro-American cultural and historical exchanges and African American experiences in coerced migration and labor across the Atlantic Ocean, then the transpacific, which incorporates the experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders, brings up a new set of questions and challenges. From the outset, transpacific American studies has confronted the question of how to position itself in relation to the existing fields of Asian studies and Pacific studies and also to the growing field of Asian American studies. In Anna Brickhouse's words, we cannot dismiss the possibility of "Western academic imperialism" even though it is not an imminent problem. 4 If we invoke the transnational as the new field imaginary at the center of American studies as Fishkin challenges us to do, there also arises the question of what constitutes a common thread through American studies, Asian studies, and Pacific studies. In other words, what do we make of Eric Hayot's provocative appropriation of the transnational turn as "the Asian turns"? 5 Above all, the transpacific as the most promising, vigorous, and dynamic dimensions of transnational American studies should probe the critical questions of how to move beyond a simple negation of American exceptionalism and how to engage the Asia Pacific and Pacific Islands in a productive way that would generate alternative discourses grounded in non-Western and Third World epistemologies and generating new systems of knowledge production and dissemination. It is precisely in this sense that we invoke the trope "oceanic archives" as the material basis of such critical interventions in the transnational turn of American studies. By "oceanic archives, " we first and foremost engage what Ann Laura Stoler articulates as the "politics of comparison, " 6 which serves as a new critical

Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean (Journal of Transnational American Studies)

Journal of Transnational American Studies 5.1 (2013): 1-20

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a white American preacher and an African American scholar arrived at converging prophecies regarding the racialized colonial and postcolonial trends that would characterize planetary relations during the coming decades. In 1885, Josiah Strong (of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States) predicted that "the world [will] enter upon a new stage of its history-the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled." "Strengthened in the United States," averred Strong, "this powerful race will move down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond." 1 Less than two decades after Strong advanced this prediction, W. E. B. Du Bois advanced a geographically similar vision of racial conflict in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Prefacing a discussion of the US Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois famously wrote, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." 2 The two men's visions were clearly antithetical in terms of their racial and imperial politics. Strong focused on the extension of one race's influence over others, while Du Bois focused on relations between the races, in the context of but also above and beyond mere imperial might. In other writings, Du Bois would suggest that, similar to colonies in relation to the European empires, those territories in which the United States was pursuing colonial expansion could also prove to be intractable shadows, difficult to administer and control. 3 Regardless of these differences, Du Bois and Strong converged in their conceptualizations of the twentieth century's major actors and the planetary geographies upon which these actors would perform. Their visions adumbrated events that would transpire within Roberts and Stephens: Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean 1 several continental regions, but these prophecies also predicted major conflicts within a non-continental and non-regional space, "the islands of the sea," a transregional archipelago constituted by all the islands splayed across the world's seas and oceans.

Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies

Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, 2019

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