Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures by Erin Suzuki (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures by Erin Suzuki Hi'ilei Julia Hobart (bio) Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures by Erin Suzuki Temple University Press, 2021 AT ITS HEART, Erin Suzuki's Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures asks us to read the Pacific through an ethics of relationality by bringing Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander works into conversation. Suzuki marshals this broad corpus of literature in order to offer a necessary and overdue centering of the Pacific in the transpacific. She productively urges scholars away from a world of transpacific imaginaries toward, instead, a vast universe of Pacific knowledges. Across the course of the book, Suzuki wends her way through the promises and limits of the transpacific as a project, an idea, and a conceptual framework. This exploration unfolds temporally and thematically across the chapters, beginning with Cold War militarism and its attendant colonial violences. Next, she turns to experiences of fugitivity in the wake of war and the ongoing, multiple dispossessions wrought by nuclearization. Capitalism is an animating concern across the book as a whole but receives especially close treatment in a chapter on labor and migration movements through the Pacific, followed by a chapter on gesture and embodiments of local identity in Hawai'i. The book, at last, concludes with a provocative meditation on virtual space and Oceanic concepts of time. The metaphors of passage, then, that Suzuki weaves throughout her book, linger with the fraught and often tender intimacies produced as people, objects, and stories move through, in addition to traveling across, the Pacific. Suzuki makes a compelling case for Asian American studies to take seriously the political and institutional concerns of Pacific Island(er) studies. Suzuki's interest in seeking out what Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have in common, as peoples who come from histories of ocean passage, refuses to equivocate commonality with sameness. She particularly draws attention to how our understandings and politics might shift when we tarry-in-places of encounter. Asian American literature's purchase on oceanic crossings, often used to plumb the conceptual depths of diaspora and belonging, capitalism and empire, is expanded and enriched by careful and tender dialogue with works from Hawai'i, Aolepān Aorōkin Ṃajeḷ [End Page 160] (Republic of the Marshall Islands), Samoa, Guåhan (Guam), Aotearoa, and others—not to conflate them as at all equivalent, but at the very least, entangled. And why should they be treated as anything less? We are in relation—frequently—when we travel along, or get in the way, of empire's pathways. To this day, scholarly efforts to account for the Pacific in the transpacific tend to be overdetermined by Hawai'i-centric paradigms. In part, this is because of the relative institutional heft of University of Hawai'i as an intellectual hub of Oceania. This context also birthed the analytic of Asian settler colonialism, which is useful for interrogating the capacity of the American state to disrupt coalition building between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Suzuki's focus, too, skews toward Hawai'i, though she makes a sincere effort to extend readings beyond that frame. While a potential limitation of the work, I name this not necessarily as a critique—I am myself a Hawai'i-focused scholar—but as a way of expressing how much more there is to understand and say about relationality across and through the Pacific. As she rightly shows, Hawai'i is not the only place in and from which we can envision relations, and settler colonialism is not the only form of colonialism operating within Oceania. Ocean Passages is a timely book that will be of interest to scholars and students of Indigeneity, race, and diaspora across the fields of ethnic, Native, Asian American, and Pacific studies. It is, in particular, essential reading for Asian Americanists. In addition to Suzuki's superb literary analyses, her book asks pointed questions about a field's relationship—or perhaps its obligations—to Oceanic peoples and places. This reckoning has been a long time coming (calls for the disaggregation of the AAPI acronym are now decades old and still unresolved...