Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Ecopoetic Transfigurations in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania:Ecopoetic Transfigurations in the Anthropocene Rob Sean Wilson (bio) The place-shattering practices, resource extractions, slow violence, oil wars, and migratory displacements across borders occurring under the reign of global capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and material resources of what we would have recognized (in the wake of poetic thinkers as diverse as Henry David Thoreau, Martin Heidegger, Hilda Doolittle, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Gaston Bachelard) as modes of dwelling-in-the-world. This telos of globalizing marketized values as norm ends up deforming the moral-cultural ethos of place and being which it takes for any such diverse practices to emerge and survive on what Waichee Dimock (2020) has described as a "weak planet" of declining democracies, runaway pandemics, unsustainable ecological systems, unstable weather, extreme events, zero-sum agonistics, authoritarian regimes, and rampant species extinctions. The approach posited in this essay would (against all such global odds) theorize, gesture toward, and activate an ethos and various tactics of resilient "worlding" and "reworlding" situated from coastal California across the transpacific space of Oceania to affiliated sites of survivance in Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere across the Anthropocene. This push toward "worlding Asia into Oceania" as such would imply not so much another Euro-derived theory universally applied as method for explaining the worlding of Asia and Oceania as it means instead to activate and elaborate diverse and situated practices of worlding in and across Asia and Oceania.1 This essay assumes, argues for, and will attempt to substantiate differences between the worlding of Asia (of here meaning tactics done to) versus a worlding in Asia (in here meaning tactics diversely enacted by peoples and values located in place, situated, and acting on the world). In shifting discursive contexts, Pacific Ocean cultural formations have long designated, at least since the 1980s if not postwar decades earlier, distinctive regions variously called "Asia Pacific" or "Asia/Pacific," as well as the more emergent framework of "inter-Asia," or denominated by the enduring environmental framework tied to tectonic plates and [End Page 65] climate currents called grandly the "Pacific Rim." Such re-formations of this vast oceanic region, geography, nation, peoples, and places are not all that disconnected from earlier Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, or Arctic oceanic frameworks and currents of transformation situated within the Anthropocene as shared planetary epoch.2 As will touched upon here and as I theorize more broadly in a forthcoming study called Pacific Beneath the Pavements, worlding should not be taken as another gesture, theme, or tactic reflecting world processes of late capitalism as the normative telos within the modernity and extreme weathers of the Anthropocene. Even a recent essay titled "Border Reading: Epistemic Reading and the Worlding of Postcolonialism" (Alaisal 2017) assumes that the meaning of worlding is all but synonymous with the global-capitalist dynamic of world literature as a hegemonic system centered in the metropolitan marketing and absorbing of the peripheries, even as the author argues that we should attend to the "border gnosis" of postcolonial sites like those in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Singapore to which his own studies of the literary humanities would remain affiliated. If the global is not the world as such, as Eric Hayot (2012), Pheng Cheah (2016), and Bruce Robbins (2017), among others, have delineated by advocating postcolonial and situated terms of difference, worlding should not be equated with these dynamics of neoliberal globalization as is commonly assumed as historical inevitability. Still, how can creative and research workers in literature, urban, ethnographic, oceanic, or cultural studies actualize these altered temporalities or posit modes of emergent or altered spatiality "in the era of globalization"—to invoke The Worlding Project (Connery and Wilson 2007) collection's subtitle—that had substantiated these emergent differences between "globalization" and "worlding" as horizon of historical possibility, world-making, life-world, values, and world-becoming? This large-scale unmaking of the life-world (what will here be called deworlding) under the often unjust, naturalized, rapacious, and disruptive spread of globalization is what creative philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is getting at when he contends, in The Creation of the World...