In the Air, over the Sea, through an Empire: Aviation Infrastructure and Territorial Affect across Micronesia

• In Event: The US Empire in the Present

Abstract

This paper examines the United Airlines “Island Hopper,” the long-running aviation route linking Honolulu to Guåhån/Guam through five Micronesian stopovers, as a contemporary infrastructure of US empire. Rather than treating empire metaphorically, the analysis approaches it as a lived institutional formation whose coherence is reproduced through ordinary mobilities, logistical dependencies, and the feelings that attach to them. Moving between a US state, a US territory, and two independent CoFA states, the Hopper is a corridor that quietly organizes sovereignty, belonging, and obligation across the region.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and analysis of travel media, the paper conceptualizes the Island Hopper as an affective infrastructure: a system that not only moves people, goods, and mail but also generates recurring emotions—relief, dependence, familiarity, resignation, awe—that stabilize the uneven political arrangements linking Micronesia to the United States. Routine procedures such as check-in, security screening, customs variations, cargo loading, and the visible presence of postal and military shipments form a moving border regime. These small scenes give practical and emotional shape to US territoriality, normalizing the United States as indispensable connector and protector even as its liberal governance frays.
The paper also highlights the stratified labor that sustains this corridor—service workers, ground crews, technical specialists, and administrative personnel—whose efforts absorb infrastructural frictions and keep the route functioning as an everyday lifeline. Through this analysis, the paper argues that the Island Hopper makes visible how empire endures through the combination of logistical power and affective experience. It shows how aviation infrastructure becomes a mechanism of rule, stitching together disparate sovereignties into an imperial geography felt as both necessary and natural.

Author

• Ryan Centner, London School of Economics