On Trans-Pacific Nuclear Emergence/y

• In Event: Empire and Asian American Studies

Abstract

Much of the critical scholarship produced under the disciplinary rubric of Asian American studies has contributed to demonstrating that ‘Asian America’ is not only a product of the racialized U.S. immigration policies and nationalism but also a trace of transpacific imperial violence of the U.S. capitalist militarism. More crucially, over the past two decades or so, the transnational Asian/American scholarship has increasingly clarified that the militarized liberal violence foundational to Asian/American formations is not a product of the U.S. empire alone but one embedded in the history of interimperial entanglement involving the Spanish, British, Chinese, Japanese empires and more. In my paper I wish to extend these critical insights to highlight the possibilities of Asian/American and Asian/Canadian critique for unsettling the globally sustained structure of nuclearism in peace and war, but without exceptionalizing nuclearity. I will explore critical sensibilities that seem to have emerged at the junctures of the Indigenous critique concerning the multifaceted “slow violence” of colonial nuclear injuries in the United States, Canada, and the Pacific Islands, and the Asian/American and Asian/Canadian challenges to the past and ongoing interimperial violences. What state of emergence/y such junctures might bring about within and against the global complex of nuclear imperialisms and to the broader geopolitical imaginaries underpinning security capitalism, colonialism, and militarism?

Author

• Lisa Yoneyama, University of Toronto