Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific

Abstract

The Pacific Ocean, as this book asserts, is “not [simply] a garbage patch” (xi); instead, it is an agentic material assemblage that participates in planetary discourses. As Macarena Gómez-Barris puts it in her foreword, for instance, the world's largest body of water “biodynamically devours and expels . . . memories of [World War II], these hauntings and traces of the colonial/imperial divide” (xi). As such, the ocean materializes itself as “that wild and enormous container of cultural memory” (xiv).An attunement to such nonhuman agency, albeit an understated one, animates Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. For more than Ann Laura Stoler's notion of “imperial debris” explicitly deployed throughout the book, it is the attention to the Pacific Ocean in its material ecology, including its colonial history, that makes the book's proposed “coalitional possibilities” (2) conceivable in the first place. And so, the “transpacific” functions here not only as a particular geographical marker but as an “ideological imaginary” embodied by such a region of the world, through which the enduring imperialism across the Pacific can be interrogated (21). Thus, when one speaks of how the “transpacific otherwise . . . refuses closure” (xiii), for instance, it can be understood as referring to not only the continued resistance of humans in the region against imperialism but the participation even of nonhuman matters here in such struggles.The volume features thirteen essays clustered into four parts, each opening with a poem by the Indigenous Chamoru writer Craig Santos Perez “highlighting Indigenous Pacific voice, creativity, resistance, and activism” (23). More than epigraphs, the poems, in their sheer lyric materiality, disrupt the scholarly language pervading the book, affectively grounding the overall discourse in the lived experience of those in the Pacific, human and nonhuman alike, who suffer the brunt of imperial ravagings. In this sense, the book channels what John C. Ryan considers as the “performative-restorative” power of literature, “moving beyond the depiction of imperial ruination” and compelling toward “the (re)imagining of potentialities for nature-culture assemblage” (96).The four parts of the book are identified in terms of the chapters’ common preoccupations. Part 1 proposes methodologies to interrogate the ecological in transpacific texts—namely, Jeffrey Santa Ana's transdisciplinary transpacific queer ecologies, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez's deconstruction of white space in Philippine botanic specimen documents, Chitra Sankaran's creative critical alliance between the Hindu goddess and rust, and John C. Ryan's valuation of Papua New Guinean poetry as performative-restorative materials. Part 2 describes instances of resistance against the militarization strategy imposed by the empire across the Pacific, like Emily Cheng's observed recourse of Vietnamese American refugee narratives to environmental tropes, Heidi Amin-Hong's Vietnamese environmental aesthetics of ruin, and Zhou Xiaojing's appraisal of Micronesian ecopoetry as decolonizing mourning. Meanwhile, part 3 activates the decolonial potency of Indigenous sensibilities in light of settler colonialism, such as Rebecca H. Hogue's assertion of Kānaka Maoli sacred genealogies in face of militarization in Hawai‘i, Rina Garcia Chua's practice of “disentracing” via Philippine and Canadian ecopoetry, and Ti-Han Chang's exploration of the “nomad body” found in Taiwanese Indigenous ecowriting. Finally, part 4 offers imaginations of future survival from the present ecological ruination, as in Amy Lee's climate-conscious intuition of the human as a force that is always entangled with the world, Emalani Case's discussion of the chant “Nā Kūkulu” as a way to critique and even counter settler colonial discourse, and Chad Shomura's reworking of the plastic as a matter potentially destabilizing imperial structures.The critical concerns addressed in the four parts of the book inevitably overlap with each other, and so there is also a perceivable looseness among the chapter clusters. And yet it is also this kind of grouping that allows exciting resonances to emerge. For instance, in part 2, the distant waters in Cheng's reading of a Vietnamese American refugee narrative becomes an intimate and generative site in Amin-Hong's regard of Vietnamese protest art before becoming the Pacific Ocean again, where Zhou's analysis of Micronesian ecopoetry takes place. In this sense, the book is most powerfully comparative—indeed, truly transpacific—when nonhuman matters are recognized to constitute and participate in discourse on empire ruination; at its weakest, such as in Santa Ana's and Sankaran's treatment on garbage and rust, respectively, nonhuman matters appear to simply serve as analogues, with their intimate entanglement to seemingly exclusively human affairs still wanting of further articulation.In its precise attempt to frame ecological ruination as a crisis that cannot be addressed without simultaneously confronting the interconnected realities of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, this book ultimately presents an important contribution to the fields of environmental humanities, transpacific studies, and even empire studies, among others. Moreover, with its strategic turn to the Pacific region as the locus of its critique, the book lets emerge often understated transpacific sensibilities, which in turn grants visibility to alternative coalitions that are grounded not only in geographical proximities but also in struggles and worldviews that resonate across the region and beyond. As such, more than articulating of the endurance of imperial debris, Empire and Environment reminds us that among the ruins there also lie possible futures, with marginalized human and nonhuman lives perpetually persisting.

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