Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al. Yiwen Liu (bio) Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. Ix + 295 pp. $72.00. Hardback. ISBN 978-988-8455-77-5. While transpacific studies has primarily focused on the cultural-historical and socio-political relationship between Asia and North America, ensuing scholarship—like Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), Josephine Lee's Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (2019), and Rachel C. Lee's The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (2014)—has gradually expanded the field by including works of Pacific Islanders to further critique the ongoing aftermath of multiple colonialisms in the transpacific world. The volume Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson, continues this expansion of the field by emphasizing frameworks and contexts from inter-Asia cultural studies, decoloniality (via Walter Mignolo), and Oceania (via Epeli Hau'ofa). Born out of an international conference held in Hong Kong in 2011, this collection has twelve contributors from various academic fields, including English, Asia Pacific studies, history, Indigenous literary studies, and cultural studies. One major purpose of this interdisciplinary collection, as the editor, Yuan Shu, writes in the introduction, is to investigate "how to move beyond a simple negation of American exceptionalism and how to engage the Asia Pacific and Pacific islands in a productive way that would generate … new systems of knowledge production and dissemination" (1). Put differently, the editors find it inadequate to focus critique solely on US militarism itself; instead, this collection complicates our understanding of global power dynamics by foregrounding alternative relations in transpacific regions and enriching our imagination of a future oceanic community through Indigenous epistemologies. [End Page 512] The collection broadens transpacific studies through coverage of the non-hegemonic connections, flows, and memories across the Asia Pacific. Early scholarship in transpacific studies, such as Hoskins and Nguyen's Transpacific Studies (2014), was devoted to decentering nation-states by focusing on the movements of people, materials, and cultures, yet much of its discussion was primarily in response to the ways in which major powers (i.e., the United States, China, and Japan) have shaped the transpacific. While this was a crucial step for an emerging field, scholars have long been aware of the absent attention to the lateral relationships among minor places in the Asia Pacific. This collection answers this call partially by integrating Asian American studies and inter-Asia cultural studies. Viet Thanh Nguyen's chapter, "Memories of Murder: The Other Korean War (in Viet Nam)," for instance, analyzes how Korean cultural representations remember and forget Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War—a reinvestigation of America's military project from perspectives within Asia. While demonstrating that US imperialism is the originator of the unjust wars across Asia, Nguyen's chapter reminds us that contemporary memory politics in South Korea is inseparable from the country's sub-imperial position during and after the Vietnam War. Speaking to the collection's overall advocacy of reconceptualizing the notion of transpacific relations, Nguyen writes that "the oceanic is not only the space between the United States and elsewhere, but between Korea and its own elsewhere in Viet Nam" (192). The collection further expands transpacific studies by drawing attention to Latin America. Evelyn Hu-DeHart's chapter, entitled "Spanish Manila: A Transpacific Maritime Enterprise and America's First Chinatown," traces Latin America's long history in making the transpacific world by revealing that the history of commerce (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries) between Spanish colonized Mexico and south China is an indispensable but often neglected part of the later establishment of the US empire. Repositioning Manila's first Chinatown in the triangulation of Spanish Latin America, Chinese feudal regime, and Anglo North America, Hu-DeHart's chapter inspires scholars of borderlands, like myself, to nuance the roles played by port cities in the negotiation and transformation between multiple empires. This chapter is representative of the collection's consistent practice of decolonizing...