Keith L. Camacho

Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions Across the American Empire

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 Americas colonial presence ...

Homomilitarism The Same-Sex Erotics of the US Empire in Guam and Hawai‘i

On July 20, 2009, Bill 185 was up for consideration in the thirtieth session of the Guam legislature. As the first bill of its kind in Guam and other US territories in the Pacific, Bill 185 aimed to provide samesex partners the benefits accorded to married citizens in an island fraught with an ongoing history of militarism. After several months of public deliberation, however, the Guam legislature refused to entertain Bill 185, unlike in Hawai‘i, another militarized location, where samesex debates have greatly advanced the legalization of “gay marriage” there and internationally since the 1990s.1 As the scholar Dennis Altman explains, the “idea of ‘gay marriage’ became a major issue in the United States in 1996, following a case in the Hawaii Supreme Court which seemed likely to recognize samesex marriage as constitutional.”2 The recent passage of Bill 232 in Hawai‘i on February 16, 2011, for example, stems from the landmark case Baehr v. Lewin, to which Altman refers. Contrary to the failed passage of Bill 185 in Guam, Hawai‘i’s Bill 232 legalizes civil unions. As Hawai‘i governor Neil Abercrombie proclaimed, “For me, this bill represents equal rights for all the people of Hawaii.”3 As these legislative examples illustrate, the American colonies of Guam and Hawai‘i now inform and are informed by the samesex erotics of the US empire, by which I mean civil rights orientations of samesex legislation and rights. At the cen-

Crossing oceans: an afterword

How, and for what reasons, might one cross an ocean? How might we analyze, as well, crossings of another time, place, and people? And what can be said of future crossings? If we turn to this volume on transatlantic and transpacific connections edited by Nicole Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen, we can cultivate an early twenty-first century sensibility about the crossing of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Specifically, Poppenhagen and Temmen have compiled a fine collection of essays that reflect a new and uneven but nevertheless shared awareness of Black diasporas, climate change, Indigenous rights, historical and literary methodologies, slavery, social movements, and transnationalism across the Atlantic and the Pacific. To be clear, their eight international contributors do not claim expertise in each of these matters. Nor are they dominated by a single demographic, period, or theme. But when we spatially address their topics through the local and global lens of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, we can witness how such crossings might be achieved at this juncture in time among the Englishspeaking scholars of academia. Three decades ago, for instance, one would have been hard-pressed to identify a discipline, forum, or publication that featured and linked, as this collection brilliantly does, Canadian Inuit articulations of sovereignty in the Artic with Herman Melville’s representation of piracy in the novella “Benito Cereno” (1855/1856) and with, even further afar, Venetian mappings of the early modern world in the sixteenth century. Today, much has changed, as illustrated in Poppenhagen and Temmen’s text, “Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies.” As Terry Eagleton once revealed, ideas travel and transform, as do the people, institutions, and religions that create poetry and prose, literature and theater. A comparable shift is now underway with how scholars of the Atlantic and the Pacific cross into and learn from each other’s paradigms. Nowhere is this sensibility more apparent than in the anthologizing of ideas in Indigenous studies, Pacific Worlds studies, and transnational studies. As demonstrated in the poems of Craig Santos Perez – a few are published here – and in the literary works of Carlos Bulosan, it remains clear that a swell of interdisciplinary discussions by diasporic, immigrant, indigenous, queer, and women authors has arrived on the sandy and rocky shores of the disciplines. Therefore, I commend Nicole Poppenhagen and Jens Temmen for fostering this sensibility among their contributors. In this manner, anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, and others can better revisit older texts in an effort to enrich our understanding of oceanic worlds, as with Juliane Braun’s analysis of the sea otter skin trade in Captain James Cook’s voyages. The crossing over into watery spaces – be they channels, reefs, or straits – would allow us, as well, to

Decolonisation and the Pacific

Since the foundation of The Journal of Pacific History in 1966, the study of decolonisation in the Pacific has never been far from the historical limelight, but the critical approaches, perspective...