Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands

Abstract

Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas. By Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. 250 pages. $99.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 232 pages. $95.00 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures. By Erin Suzuki. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. 268 pages. $110.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). How do we make sense of Asian-Indigenous relations across settler colonial states? In what ways have Asian-Indigenous entanglements been structured by militarism, settler colonialism, and liberal empire? In 2000, the Kanaka Maoli scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask coined the term "settlers of color" to describe nonwhite, non-Indigenous communities in Hawai'i who, even as they bear the brunt of labor exploitation and racial exclusion, are structurally implicated in the ongoing dispossession of Native Hawaiians.1 In particular, Trask pinpointed East Asian Americans' rise to key positions of power in the Democratic Party following statehood, marking their direct responsibility for policies that uphold the occupation of the illegally overthrown Hawaiian Kingdom. In response, Asian American scholar-activists in and from Hawai'i such as Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Okamura, and Dean Itsuji Saranillio have developed the field of Asian settler colonialism studies, which seeks to grapple with Asian American attachments to the settler state even as it demands forms of ethical accountability and Asian-Indigenous solidarity, as theorized by Fujikane's term "settler ally."2 Moving beyond the context of Hawai'i, other American studies scholars have offered different key terms and concepts for attending to Asian-Indigenous relations in the wake of war, settler colonialism, and migration. The Chickasaw [End Page 1067] scholar Jodi Byrd's concept of the "transit of empire" illuminates how the imperial United States "made Indian" those lands and peoples it sought to conquer, replicating the so-called Indian Wars across Turtle Island with the wars of military occupation and empire building across Oceania and Asia.3 "Settler imperialism"—Byrd's term for the concomitant processes of settler colonialism and imperialism—displaced Asian subjects onto Indigenous lands and waters, necessitating the terms "arrivant," which Byrd borrows from the Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite, and "arrivant colonialism" to index the distinct contours of nonwhite migrants' implication in the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Native peoples.4 As such, Byrd insists that we attend to the "cacophonies" of colonialism: the chaotic, often contradictory ways that settler imperialism positions racialized and Indigenous communities in relation.5 Engaging Marxist theory and homing in on the racialization of Asian laborers in the North American context, Iyko Day proposes that the position of "arrivant" can be more precisely articulated as the "alien"—a migrant positionality marked for exploitation and exclusion that is nonetheless complicit in Indigenous displacement and dispossession via a logic of settler colonial capitalism.6 Gesturing more expansively, Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents takes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European liberalism as a point of departure for thinking about how British imperialism, settler colonialism across the Américas, the transatlantic slave trade, and Asian labor migration are entangled, both historically and in the contemporary moment.7 Her book offers "intimacy" as a reading practice, heuristic, and methodology for relational ethnic studies projects. The three books discussed here build on these relational studies of Asian-Indigenous entanglements in new and exciting ways. They engage literature, photography, history, and law to think through Asian and Indigenous proximities and affinities across multiple geographies of mutual encounter: the Américas, Alaska, and Oceania. Although sharply attentive to how settler colonialism, liberal empire, and racial capitalism shape Asian-Indigenous relations, collectively these books engage aesthetic cross-representations, shared intimacies, and imaginative possibilities that move us beyond binary oppositions and political impasses. In this way, the books are deeply feminist and hopeful in their orientations and commitments. All three theorize space in relation to time, offering conceptual tools that emerge from specific sociohistorical contexts yet can travel and be taken up in new directions. Although anchored in...