Gary Y. Okihiro

Unsettling the Imperial Sciences

Latitudes of climates and constitutions, like the allied myth of continents and races, have a deep and persistent past within European and US imperial discourses both as language and ideology. Taxonomies that name, classify, and attribute natures to lands, waters, climates, plants, animals, and peoples discipline, interpellate, and exert dominion over them. Those sciences create subjects, and in their imposition of order and hierarchies, they constitute the imperial project. Conversely, reconstituting space by deconstructing the racialized, gendered, and sexualized attributions of islands and continents, the tropical and temperate zones can unsettle the imperial order and endanger the privileges and poverties they sustain. Toward that end, this essay suggests a remapping of our Earth according to tectonic geographies, in their plenitude inclusive of both lands and waters and their biotic communities and their ceaseless movements and engagements.

Self and history

This personal essay examines the authors personal and intellectual trajectory from his experiences growing up in a plantation in Hawai`i to his academic engagement with African and Asian American history. Constructing the essay around the polarities and unions of space and time, he explores the way the self and the scholar, multiply constituted by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, was and is a work in progress.

Of space/time and the pineapple

This article considers space and time as relational constructs and quantum states that correspond with assignments of spatial and temporal distinctions and values. The career of the pineapple, in its transgressions of land and water, the temperate and tropical latitudes, the Atlantic and Pacific, America and the rest of the world, illustrates imperialism and the social construction of space/time.

Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945.

Illustrations Preface Part I: Years of Migrant Labor, 1986-1909 1. So Much Charity, So Little Democracy 2. Hole Hole Bushi 3. With the Force of Wildfire Part II: Years of Dependency, 1910-1940 4. Cane Fires 5. In the National Defense 6. Race War 7. Extinguishing the Dawn 8. Dark Designs Part III: World War II, 1941-1945 9. Into the Cold Night Rain 10. Bivouac Song 11. In Morning Sunlight Notes Index