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Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 537 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.135.537.22

1535-1882

Chad Shomura,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

The Pacific is dense, layered, vast. It is full, not just of creatures beautiful and sublime but also histories of war, nuclear testing, colonial settlement, ecological disruption, and capitalist extraction. Moreover, it is rich in stories, meaning, and life shared among humans and nonhumans. As the twenty-first century unfolds, will the Pacific offer devastation or life?Erin Suzuki's Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures is a powerful advocate of the latter. Suzuki underscores the importance of engaging Native studies and Indigenous peoples—not as neglected areas and objects of study but as subjects of knowledge and invaluable kin. The book illuminates how literary expression vitalizes alternative forms of being, relation, and futurity. The task is not to establish what transpacific studies should be; Suzuki aspires to build community, not flash academic showmanship. Ocean Passages exemplifies how transpacific studies might foster a vibrant Pacific in the face of ruination.The introduction provides a fine overview of key issues in Asian American, transpacific, and Pacific Islander studies. Each chapter likewise is a remarkable weave of information and interpretation. Chapters 1 (“Militarized Passages”) and 4 (“Embodied Passages”) are clear examples, which provide detailed background and fresh insights into the militarized history of the Pacific and Asian settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi. Ocean Passages will have broad appeal, for established scholars to students eager for sharp analysis while needing some background knowledge.The best offering of Ocean Passages is its framework of Asian American studies and Pacific Islander studies as “incommensurate, yet interrelated” (p. 8). This deceptively simple formulation pinpoints a predicament at the heart of transpacific studies: how to describe relations between Asian America and Indigeneity. Interrelationality entails that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are non-discrete groups. Incommensurability has been a seawall against the absorption of Pacific Islanders into Asian American frameworks. Interrelationality and incommensurability do not sit well together. The main hazard of hastily joining them is not inaccuracy but diminished political possibility. Overemphasis on interrelationality can dilute genealogical ties to land and sea; incommensurability can diffuse collective politics and modes of being.Attempts to resolve this tension might reduce Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to ontological fixtures or hollow vessels. Suzuki follows the harder path of engaging passage on its own terms. Passage usually vanishes into passage between, becoming a mere derivative of two points: Asia and America; land and sea; settler and Native. This is evident in transpacific studies that drain the Pacific of people, relations, and meaning. Suzuki addresses many sources of these oversights: the terracentrism of Western thought, which divides land and sea while understanding the latter through the former (as territory to be possessed); figurations of the ocean as empty seas and arenas of economic competition; and treatment of Native peoples as hapless victims who are doomed to vanish. (There is also an implicit critique of Western philosophies that value product over process and substance over relation.) Without respect for passage, scholars risk fortifying an epistemology of separation, categorization, and hierarchy that has made the Pacific fodder for military adventurism, colonial dispossession, scientific experimentation, and capitalist extraction.Ocean Passages deftly engages a complex issue: how to treat the Pacific, and passage more generally, as a distinct phenomenon but not an empirical positivity. Suzuki shows that it is better to follow rather than pin down the dynamism of the Pacific. Asian American and Pacific Islander literatures lead to multiple senses of passage: flow and circulation, yes, but also blockage and violation. Suzuki investigates situations of impasse—stark incommensurabilities between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders—and moments of trespass—when Asian settlers claim Native places. To respect these complexities, Suzuki adjusts her approach across the chapters. Some instances call for comparison; others for teasing out entanglements; still others for insisting on singularity. Suzuki exemplifies the methodological agility demanded of scholars who wish to navigate the Pacific.While the Pacific eludes an encapsulating framework, recurring patterns are identifiable due to entangled histories of militarism, war, global capitalism, and settler colonialism. One dominant trend is the shuttling of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into competitive hierarchies that disallow collaboration. This is clearest in chapter 3, “Commercial Passages.” Suzuki astutely shows how global capitalism erodes Native sovereignty by incorporating Asians as participants and denigrates Asians by encouraging Native peoples to view them as emblems of capitalist encroachment. Against this splintering, Suzuki reads the work of Ken Liu, Maxine Hong Kingston, Epeli Hauʻofa, and Konai Helu Thaman to uncover modes of exchange that are neither competitive nor extractive. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders may build relations while on the move, forging complex, shifting topographies in friction with capitalist maps of static, homogeneous space.Suzuki develops this creative labor through a compelling shift from solidarity to affinity. Solidarity is static and narrow (oftentimes limited to political agendas). Affinity is dynamic and broad, ranging from culture to cosmology. It also honors interrelationality and incommensurability—common currents are not always common causes. Chapter 2, “Refugee Passages,” best illustrates the promise of affinity through writings by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and lê thi diễm thúy. While acknowledging clear differences between climate refugees and war refugees, Suzuki astutely discerns productive affinities: appreciation of non-humans as kin; an embrace of vulnerability; collective forms of agency; and cyclical modes of time. These affinities unveil a Pacific beyond fantasies of liberal humanism that launch capitalist expansion, imperial hegemony, and ecological upheaval.Affinities are crucial to surviving militarism, global capitalism, and settler colonialism. Chapter 5, “Virtual Passages,” clarifies the stakes of Suzuki's book. Projected futures of economic prosperity and ecological catastrophe hold little place for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. State efforts to soften exploitation and remediate ecological devastation reproduce their underlying epistemologies and exclusions. Suzuki engages Robert Sullivan, Emelihter Kihleng, Craig Santos Perez, and Ruth Ozeki to retrieve alternative futures, whose source is not settler capitalist greed but the collective labor of cultivating shared abundance.Passage is tough to keep in view but worthy of loving attention. At stake in this tough endeavor is nothing less than collective survival. Transpacific studies would do well to heed this important lesson, for Ocean Passages shows that survival requires more than showing up to each other's fights. It certainly is not staying afloat by holding others underwater. It is the ongoing struggle of nourishing futurity in common. Reading across Asian American and Pacific Islander literatures is vital for this project. Suzuki shows us how to distill sustenance from their richness, making Ocean Passages a necessary wayfinder to Pacific futures.