Islands of US Empire Across the Pacific

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The ASA 2025 Conference location in the Caribbean abutting the Atlantic provides an opportunity to reflect upon the persistence of empires linking imperial formations between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Islands in the Caribbean share with Pacific Islands overlapping empires, including those from Spain, England, and Portugal. Puerto Rican artist, Bad Bunny’s recently released song, “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAII,” pontificates in español about, “What Happened to Hawai‘i.” Drawing connections between Puerto Rico and the Hawaiian Islands, he sings about the beauty of the islands, including their “lush green mountains,” the beach, and the shore. However, he cautions “I don't want them to do to you [Puerto Rico] the same thing that happened to Hawaii.”

Indeed, Puerto Rico and Hawai‘i, along with other islands in the Pacific, share the legacy of US colonialism through militarism, agribusiness, tourism, and indigenous displacement. Bad Bunny demands that these islands of the US empire be examined together in a comparative context. Through a set of precirculated questions addressing the intersections across Islands, Empires, and Archipelagos, this roundtable focuses on US militarism and securitization with an emphasis on the contradictions of collaboration with and resistance to US Empire across various types of institutions. For instance, how do we understand the contradictions in the charter of the University of Hawai‘i, an institution that declares itself “Indigenous serving” while having formal connections with the Department of Defense? While growing resistance is reducing the number of US military bases on the Korean peninsula, Korean military and US armed forces regularly host joint military exercises in Guam, facilitating a culture of shared fraternity and conjoined settler militarism over the island nation. The resistance to US militarism in Okinawa resulted in the shifting of US military installations to Guam. Taken together, along with Bad Bunny’s warning to islands across oceans, this roundtable brings to Puerto Rico an examination of Empires across the Pacific.

Topics include:

Militarism and demilitarization in the Pacific
Expansion of US Empire into the Pacific
Futures of Empire
Securitization
Alternatives/Resistance to Empire
Imperial/Island Collisions
Comparative US Empire

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Nalani Saito, Northwestern University

• Nitasha Sharma, Northwestern University

• Jinah Kim, University of California Merced

• Vernadette Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

• Camilla Fojas, Arizona State University-Tempe

Biographical Information

Camilla Fojas is Foundation Professor and Director of the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research explores mediated cultures of the Americas and the Pacific through the axes of empire, security, and race with a focus on the U.S.-Mexico border within the context of the expanding borders of the United States. Her recent books include Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier (NYU Press, 2021), Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (Illinois, 2017), and Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (UT Press, 2014).

Vernadette Gonzalez is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she coordinates the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program. Her research examines the gendered and racialized cultures of U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific with a focus on tourism and militarism. She is author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke UP, 2013) and Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke UP, 2021). She is co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (Duke UP, 2019) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (2024).

Jinah Kim is a Professor in Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019). She is currently working on two book projects that centers transpacific feminist activism as it intersects with racial justice projects across sites of US military empire, exploring how artists, activists, and everyday people intervene against permanent war, state violence, military occupation, militarized migration, and racial capitalism.

Nitasha Sharma is a Professor of Black Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program and co-Directs the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies. Her work historicizes dynamics among communities of color, including cross-minority racisms, as she ethnographically documents models of Black/Asian/Kanaka solidarities. Sharma is the author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke UP, 2010) and Hawai‘i Is My Haven:Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021). She is on the board of American Quarterly for which she was an Associate Editor, and previously served on the Executive Committee of the American Studies Association.

Nalani Saito is a sociology PhD student at Northwestern University. She researches regulation and governance as tools of imperial state-making in the Pacific. Her current project analyzes interagency responses to man-made disasters at the U.S. Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Nalani is a research assistant for Mapping Nuclear Legacies, a project tracing local U.S. anti-nuclear policies and actions led by Hirokazu Miyazaki, PhD, and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Northwestern University.