Michelle Keown

Children of Israel: US military imperialism and Marshallese migration in the poetry of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

In 1946, when the US government chose Bikini atoll as a nuclear testing site, the military governor of the Marshall Islands persuaded islanders to leave their homeland on the grounds that scientists were experimenting with nuclear technology “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars”. This rhetorical sleight-of-hand holds a bitterly ironic significance given that although the Bikini Islanders believed their exile would be temporary, the resulting environmental damage from various nuclear tests has rendered the atoll uninhabitable for an estimated 30,000 years. Although the dominant discourses surrounding nuclear testing have been consistently downplayed by a US government anxious to project a narrative in which the Bikini Islanders willingly left their ancestral lands, Marshallese are still dying as a result of corporeal and environmental irradiation, diseases resulting from a forced dependency on imported western foods, and the threat of further displacement due to rising sea levels through global warming. This essay explores the imperialist legacy of US nuclear testing and responses to it in the poetry of Marshallese eco-poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s protest literature. Her work indexes displacement, health problems and ongoing sociopolitical struggles of Marshallese diasporic communities through globalized political and technological platforms such as the Internet and climate change conferences to raise awareness of, and potentially gain redress for, the socio-economic and environmental problems faced by contemporary Pacific Islanders.

Postcolonial literary history and Indian English fiction

theoretically slightly overloaded; and Markus Schmitz’s theorizing on “spatiality”, one of the latest buzz words – in addition to the inflationary use of the Latin prefix “trans-” – in the discourse on “a (post)colonial world”, does not always succeed in integrating his references into his analysis of “the spectacle of integration in Germany”. Both essays, however, signify the generally dynamic processual character of the discourse on postcolonial culture as it is convincingly displayed in both books.

Introduction: Theorizing Postcolonial Diasporas

Diaspora has become an increasingly ‘diasporic’ concept within postcolonial studies during the past decade. The term once referred specifically to the dispersal of the Jews, but within contemporary cultural analysis the term is now more likely to evoke a plethora of global movements and migrations: Romanian, African, Asian, black, Sikh, Irish, Lebanese, Palestinian, ‘Atlantic’ and so on. A corresponding expansion of diaspora’s conceptual horizons has also taken place in recent years, since it has evolved to operate as a travelling metaphor associated with tropes of mobility, displacement, borders and crossings (Procter 2003: 13). This edited collection reflects critically on the specific significance of what we have termed ‘postcolonial diasporas’, drawing together the parallel and equally contested fields of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies at a time when the horizons opened up by these research areas appear more stretched and hazy than ever before. Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals working across the disciplines of cultural studies, history, literary analysis, modern languages, sociology and visual studies, it examines both the contributions and limitations of the terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘diaspora’, and the problems and possibilities they present for future work in the humanities.