Worlding Transpacific Futurities: Military Conservation and Archipelagic Storytelling

• In Event: Water, Geology, and Archipelagic Imaginaries

Abstract

In 2021, the Biden administration outlined a vision for how the US can work collaboratively to conserve and restore the lands, waters, and wildlife that sustain the nation. In terms of the US territories across the Pacific, this conservation initiative entailed new plans to expand its marine protected areas beyond the current existing marine monuments first designated under the Bush administration. However, while the establishment of marine national monuments has been seen as a triumph of US environmentalism, conservation discourses are often structured by the rhetoric of “blue-washing” that replicates the violence of settler colonialism and militarizes the ocean in the name of protection and conservation (Perez 2014; Arriola 2023; Villagomez & Johnson 2024). Drawing on critiques of military conservation that attend to the US imperial formations, this essay explores how the archipelagic storytelling across the transpacific offers a counter-discourse that resists the territorialization of the militarized Pacific (Wilson 2022). It argues that the storied world-makings of the transpacific challenge the settler logic of enclosure and re-imagine the militarized future encoded by the state-led conservation measures. By approaching the ocean not as a defiled space to be enclosed for protection but as a relational site of caring and flourishing, the transpacific world-makings reframe the environmental discourses and envision alternative futurities in response to imperial histories and the ongoing threat of policies that undermine efforts of environmental stewardship.

Biographical Information

Chih-Chien Hsieh (PhD in English, Brandeis University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Modernism/modernity, among others. He is currently working on a project that explores the literary culture of the archipelagic Americas in the context of US imperial formations and environmental management.

Author

• Chih-Chien Hsieh, National Chung Cheng University