The Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast region beyond will become the chief theater of events in the world’s great hereafter.

– Senator William Seward before Congress, 1852

Since the advent of Pacific trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European and American powers have imagined the Pacific as a vast space of economic expansion and imperial domination.[1] This construct portrays the Pacific as both a source of wealth in foreign markets and natural resources and a tabula rasa or isolated empty space that the West can disregard or use at will. This imperial representation of the transpacific still dominates Western discourse. President Barack Obama’s “pivot” to the Pacific was a turn towards neocolonial capitalist expansion. Revealingly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 declaration that “the 21st century will be America’s Pacific century” portrayed the Pacific as an American possession to be acquired.[2] Moreover, in 2017 Attorney General Jeff Sessions questioned how “a judge sitting on an Island in the Pacific” had the authority to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order.[3] Sessions’ incredulity about the Hawaiian judge reflects the view of the Pacific as empty, isolated, and insignificant and thus incapable of influencing mainland American politics.

Uncle Sam off to make his fortunes in the Asia Pacific

This construction of the transpacific overlooks two vital discourses. First and foremost, by painting the Pacific in the broad brush of economic opportunity and empty space it ignores the diversity within the Pacific. It fuses histories and cultures while erasing others altogether. A critical role of transpacific studies is engaging what the preeminent scholar Yunte Huang calls the “deadly space in between” and exploring the many histories and discourses of the Pacific that challenge the dominant imperial framework.[4] Yet the Western vision of the Pacific also omits its own mechanisms of colonialism. By portraying Western domination of the Pacific as inevitable and natural, it fails to address how colonialism came to exist, how it is perpetuated, and what it will look like in the future. In fact, it denies the very existence of colonialism by omitting the peoples of the Pacific from its narrative.

In this project, I will use Kwajalein Atoll to critically engage with this later oversight. A United States military base since the end of World War II, Kwajalein (the largest island in the atoll that shares its name) in the Marshall Islands is a poignant example of modern American colonialism in the Pacific. By interrogating the past, present, and future of the United States’ presence on Kwajalein, I hope to denaturalize American colonialism by exposing its construction. Dismantling the discourse of Western domination in the Pacific is critical for imagining Native futurities. This project does not fall into indigenous studies since it engages with the forms and consequences of colonialism rather than native cultures. Yet neither does it fit within postcolonial studies for it recognizes and centers the continued existence of colonialism. Rather, I seek to fill what Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg identify in their essay “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity” as the “need to imagine new projects in theory and practice that acknowledge the coexistence of ongoing colonial legacies, entrenched material inequities, and already existing forms of cultural and political resistance”.[5] By challenging the dominant imperial discourse of the transpacific and denaturalizing American colonialism on Kwajalein, I seek to embrace the incommensurability between the persistence of colonialism and opportunities for Native futurity.

[1] Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, “Introduction: Transpacific Studies—Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, eds. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 2.

[2] Tina Gerhardt, “America’s Pacific Century,” Huffington Post, November 14, 2011.

[3] Charlie Savage, “Jeff Sessions Dismisses Hawaii as ‘an Island in the Pacific,’” New York Times, April 20, 2017.

[4] Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) 4.

[5] Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity,” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011): 11.