Pacific Island Studies
Contact
Erin Suzuki, Literature
Faculty and Staff Participants
Yen Le Espiritu, Ethnic Studies
Kamala Visweswaran, Ethnic Studies
Simeon Man, History
Wendy Matsumura, History
John D. Blanco, Literature
Cristela Garcia-‐Spitz, Library Special Collections
Graduate Student Participants
Sang Eun (Eunice) Lee, Literature
Trung Le, Literature
Olivia Quintanilla, Ethnic Studies
Keva Bui, Ethnic Studies
Greg Gushiken, Ethnic Studies
Riley Taitingfong, Communication
Elizabeth Bullard, Biology
Asia-Pacific and transpacific studies are poised for an “oceanic turn”: a critical reckoning with the roles that Pacific ocean environments and Indigenous Pacific communities have played in the construction of, and resistance to, the many global networks that both connect and imaginatively shape the region. The Pacific Islands (also known as “Oceania”) have formed an absent presence in the transnational policies, organizations, and partnerships that focus primarily on the nations of the “Rim”—such as the Asia-‐Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Trans-‐Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yet with our growing awareness of how the permanent and long-‐ term effects of militarization, consumer waste, and climate change have begun to physically manifest both throughout the region and around the globe, transpacific scholarship cannot to afford to ignore their critical impacts on Pacific Island communities and ecologies, nor those communities’ strategies for survival in the face of colonization, occupation, and cultural and environmental change.
This group brings attention to the intertwined relationships between the communities of the Pacific “Rim” and the Pacific Islands. In particular, we are interested in how histories of colonialism, imperialism, and economic partnership have both been built upon and contested by Pacific Island cultural and community formations; how questions of Indigenous sovereignty in sites like Hawai‘i and Guam are connected to questions of demilitarization in sites like Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines; and in exploring the entanglement of human communities and their environments in the Pacific region (including how Indigenous Pacific aesthetics, practices, and epistemologies might offer ways of thinking creatively about climate change and environmental stewardship). Covering themes and topics such as militarism, tourism, overfishing, cultural imperialism, and resource extraction, we propose to approach these interconnected issues through different disciplinary lenses, including ethnographic study, archival practice, literary analysis, and biological research. In so doing, we aim to center the cultures, communities, and environments of the Pacific itself within the fields of Asia-‐Pacific and transpacific studies.
Through the creation of this group, we seek to create a home and a space for scholars from a number of different disciplines who are interested in studying the politics, aesthetics, history, and environments of the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Islands. While we currently draw our faculty representatives from predominantly humanities and social science departments (Literature, History, and Ethnic Studies) we hope to expand the group to reach out to faculty working in Environmental Sciences, Biology, and at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. We propose to use the funds from the International Institute to fund one or two working group meetings per quarter, where we will present and workshop works-‐in-‐progress and discuss readings on the topic; and ideally we will be able to bring in one or two scholars, activists, or writers dealing with Pacific Islands issues to campus. If possible, we would additionally like to earmark a modest amount for community-‐ related activities, aimed at outreach to Pacific Island community organizations, such as Che’lu (Chamorro cultural organization) and the Pacific Islander Festival of San Diego. (A more detailed and itemized list of budget items is listed below.) Overall, we hope that the Pacific Islands Studies group will help UCSD serve as a home for a growing and dynamic field, to become both a hub for scholarship about the Pacific and its Islands, and a resource for Pacific Islander communities in San Diego.
