Reckoning With the Oceanic Territoriality of "Uncle SPAM": Processed Meats and Resurgent Seeds in Craig Santos Perez's Poetics of the Militarized Pacific

Abstract

The Pacific history of the food product SPAM is driven by what CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez characterizes as its invasive and imperial entanglements, which facilitate U.S. territoriality. A literary analysis shows how Perez uses the politics of foodways in his ongoing from unincorporated territory series (2008–2017) to make visible the United States' vast Pacific military reach and its impact on Indigenous peoples across Oceania, especially those from Guåhan (Guam). Perez maps out the ecologies of SPAM and other processed meats—ecologies characterized by occupation, erasure, and a monopoly within foodways for Indigenous peoples—showing how those meats distort, obliterate, and exploit the norms of consumption in the same ways that militarization and capitalism exploit environmental norms. Perez also portrays transoceanic ecologies and foodways that call for and enact Indigenous kinships, materialized through the ways that seeds spread and grow. Perez highlights daily acts of living and consumption through his poetics, demonstrating how U.S. territoriality limits opportunities for flourishing Indigenous lives. Simultaneously, his poetics foreground possibilities for Indigenous transoceanic abundance that offer resurgent frameworks for resisting U.S. empire and its capitalist logics.