Asian American critique and Moana Nui 2011: securing a future beyond empires, militarized capitalism and APEC

Abstract

In light of the United States’ 2011 declaration of an economic and military policy refocusing on the Asia-Pacific region, Kuan-Hsing Chen's argument for Asia as method can be expanded in Asian American critique to consider Asia and the Pacific as method. A critical analysis of Asian American settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and in the United States constitutes one such methodology that mobilizes a mode of self-reflexive inquiry in Asian American critique and conjoins it to a decolonizing and deimperializing movement in Asia and the Pacific, underscoring the need for Asian American settlers to challenge the US settler state and its assault on indigenous peoples and to enact a future beyond empires. On a global scale, US settler colonialism and its seizures of indigenous lands enable and are enabled by US imperialist practices in Asia and the Pacific. The Moana Nui 2011 conference in Honolulu countered the militarized capitalism of empires represented by APEC and the TPP, illustrating the ways that peoples of Asia and the Pacific can build on each other's struggles and enact economies that will sustain us beyond empires, economies premised not on the production of scarcity that drives capitalism but on the restoration of abundance.