Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements by Juliana Hu Pegues

Abstract

Reviewed by: Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements by Juliana Hu Pegues Michael Roellinghoff (bio) Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements, by Juliana Hu Pegues. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 232 pp. $95.00 hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-4696-5617-5; $32.95 paper. 978-1-4696-5618-2. Juliana Hu Pegues's Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements is a strikingly original book which examines intimacies and affinities between Alaska Natives and Asian immigrants in the context of both their exclusion from and differential inclusion into settler colonial Alaska. While a small but growing number of critical studies analyze contacts between Asian immigrants and Indigenous peoples within Euro-American colonial settings including Renisa Mawani's Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (2009), Iyko Day's Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (2016), and Manu Karuka's Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (2019), the exact intersections between Orientalism and settler colonialism are rarely problematized. In engaging with the question of how Orientalism relates to [End Page 108] settler colonialism, Hu Pegues displaces white settlers from their customary position at the very center of Alaska's historiography while demonstrating that, rather than a distant northern periphery, Alaska itself became a key site where American settler colonialism in North America and "blue water" imperialism in the Asia-Pacific converged in the late nineteenth century. Using a rich variety of texts ranging from government reports to photographs, and building on the critical scholarship of Jodi Byrd, Iyko Day, and Lisa Lowe, each chapter likewise focuses on a specific economy: tourism, gold mining, salmon canning, and the development of military infrastructure. Through the titular concept of "space-time colonialism," Hu Pegues argues that the constructions of Alaska Natives as "out of time" and Asian immigrants as "out of space" are co-constitutive with American settler colonialism in Alaska. Such discourses define Indigenous peoples as the antithesis of modernity and thereby "exist[ing] inauthentically in the present" and Asian immigrants as unassimilable and therefore "forever foreigners." This serves to cast white settlers as historically normative subjects while facilitating the exclusion of laboring Asian immigrants and dispossession of Alaska Natives (13–14). Admitting that "spacetime colonialism" doubles as a tongue-in-cheek Star Trek reference, Hu Pegues utilizes this term to also highlight the "colonial longing" of an Alaska imagined as America's "last frontier," echoed in Star Trek's ubiquitous title sequence. Reminding us, however, that this "frontier might not be so closed after all," she emphasizes continued assertions of Indigenous sovereignty on the land claimed unilaterally as an American possession (16). Space-Time Colonialism's chapters are arranged chronologically into four distinct periods: the years immediately following Alaska's purchase in 1867, the gold rush, its incorporation as an American territory, and America's entrance into the Second World War. Although a theoretically dense text, the largest single intervention in Space-Time Colonialism is deceptively simple. That is, what Hu Pegues calls "settler Orientalism," or, settler colonialism as functioning in part through the Orientalization of Indigenous peoples. Outlined primarily in the first chapter and drawn upon again in the fourth, Hu Pegues traces the racialized and gendered entrapment of Alaska Natives into "transnational imperial discourses" by which settlers define(d) them as "Orientals" (35). The de-indigenization of colonized peoples through their racialization is certainly not unique to Alaska (consider, for example, the term "Indian"). What is remarkable about the case of Alaska, however, is that this notion became codified as official policy in the years immediately following the 1867 Alaska Purchase. Upholding American claims to Alaska as terra nullius (ownerless no man's land), the Bureau of Indian Affairs granted rights to Alaskan Natives-as-"Orientals" to naturalize as American citizens while stripping them of their legal capacity to engage in nation-to-nation [End Page 109] negotiations over land. The irony, Hu Pegues points out, is that while purported "Asian origins yielded the possibility of citizenship for Indigenous subjects," for Asian immigrants, the same origins "foreclosed such possibilities" (31). Reading Asian American and...