Pacific Confluence: Decolonial Methodologies, Japanese Diaspora, and Island-Centered Perspectives
What kinds of histories are revealed when thinking through Asian American studies as methodologically committed to anti-imperialism and decolonization? How might we teach and write Asian American history in a way that refuses to normalize colonial dispossession, racial domination, and military occupation? Using an island-centered framework as analytical lens,
I focus on two key episodes from my book, Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i: the 1893 escape of Yosaku Imada from Oahu Prison and the 1894 Japanese fight for suffrage following the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. I explore how these two events challenged and defied the temporal and geographical limits of nation-states and influenced the formation of diasporic subjects of empire. By recovering histories that do not fit neatly within the narrative of American expansion, I argue that that U.S. empire is not only not inevitable, but also contains the seeds of its own undoing.
Bio:
Christen T. Sasaki is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California San Diego. Her research and published works focus on the politics of race and empire in the Pacific Island world. Her first book, Pacific Confluence: Fighting over the Nation in Nineteenth Century Hawai‘i (University of California Press, 2022) argues that the attempt to create a US-backed white settler state in the archipelago sparked a turn-of-the-century debate over race-based nationalism and state-based sovereignty that was fought on the global stage. Her recent articles include “Making Sartorial Sense of Empire: Contested Meanings of Aloha Shirt Aesthetics,” published in The Contemporary Pacific (2022) and “Emerging Nations, Emerging Empires: Citizenship and Sovereignty in 1893 Hawai‘i” published in Pacific Historical Review (2021).