Transpacific Radical Solidarities:Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism Leanne P. Day (bio) Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine. By Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 284 pages. $34.95 (paperback). Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State. By Moon-Ho Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 368 pages. $29.95 (cloth). Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines. By Allan E. S. Lumba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paperback). Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries. By Jodi Kim. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 272 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paperback). On July 13, 2022, US vice president Kamala Harris spoke virtually at the Pacific Islands Forum: "The history and the future of the Pacific Islands and the United States are inextricably linked. We have historic bonds going back generations, and shared fights for freedom and for liberty."1 The Pacific Islands Forum summit included a meeting of representatives from Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu; notably absent were Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, and Nauru, which all abruptly withdrew from the forum in February 2021.2 While Harris's remarks allude to the "inextricably linked" histories of the US and Oceania, her phrasing elides the specific history of uneven relations of settler colonialism, imperialism, and military expansion throughout the Pacific. Despite Harris's emphasis on "shared fights for freedom [End Page 405] and for liberty," freedom indexes US democratic freedom and military access to the Pacific as opposed to supporting decolonization. Even more revelatory in Harris's speech is the implied necessity of increasing militarized security in the Pacific against the unstated but ominous threat of China's expanding influence, particularly in the Solomon Islands. Harris twice asserts the US's investment in building "maritime security" and alludes to China's influence by promising "to strengthen the international rules-based order—to defend it, to promote it, and to build on it."3 Not only is security associated with the discourse of international norms for sovereignty, which seems at best a very glamoured, even delusional, version of American militarism and empire in the Pacific, but Harris also emphasizes the necessity of "defend[ing]" rules regarding territorial integrity. This conflates the history of perceived mutual agreement of US imperialism, along with other colonial actors, in the Pacific, and explicitly contrasts the US's stance on protection and defense against China. Harris imagines a mutual relationship between US empire dependent on what Jodi Kim discusses in Settler Garrison as the "China threat discourse," which "can be deployed as an alibi to retrench the West's own imperial and neocolonial interests … [since] the Chinese threat must be contained, and that vulnerable nations must be protected from that threat" (57). The perceived threat of China to US military dominance in the Pacific is further illustrated by President Joe Biden's meeting at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2022, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Biden's meeting reveals not only US concerns over China's influence in the South China Sea but also a disturbing revisionist history of what Biden classified as "rocky times" during former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte's thousands of extrajudicial killings.4 Biden's commitment to the "defense of the Philippines" actually references the genealogies that Moon-Ho Jung and Allan Lumba explicate in their texts to analyze how US imperialism, economic colonialism, and expansive military campaigns in the Philippines utilize the rhetoric of protection for the sake of the Philippines.5 In the staggering yet unsurprising elision of colonial relations, Biden tweeted "Our nations' relationship is rooted in democracy, common history, and people-to-people ties, including millions of Filipino-Americans who enrich our nation. Our alliance is strong and enduring" in a 2022 manifestation of implicit racial paternalism, where Filipino Americans "enrich our nation," a phrase that gestures toward a false pretense of an equal relationship...
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Jun 22, 2023
Fernando Cervantes 
Open Access