Pacific World Research Articles

Asia Pacific world views in evaluation: Inspiring regional culturally responsive practice

Asia Pacific world views in evaluation: Inspiring regional culturally responsive practice

Book Review: Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World by Joshua Savala

Book Review: <i>Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World</i> by Joshua Savala

The "Colored American Asiatic Traveler": Peter K. L. Cole and American Empire in Japan

Abstract: This article examines African Americans' participation in US empire-building in the nineteenth-century Pacific World. It uses the life story of Peter K. L. Cole, a Black world traveler and a resident of Yokohama, Japan, to explore how notions of race, empire, modernity, and citizenship circulated around the Pacific Ocean from the 1850s to the 1870s. Cole deployed the intertwined discourses of Black settler colonialism and Black orientalism to stake claims to African American equality in the post-Civil War United States. His efforts to build equal citizenship on the basis of Black men's service to American empire abroad gained little traction as the white supremacist logics of the US settler state excluded Black people from national belonging and erased their participation in imperial expansion.

Transpacific Connections in the Civil War Era

Abstract: This essay introduces the special forum on transpacific connections in the Civil War era. The forum investigates how US interaction with Asia and the Pacific shaped race relations, gender ideology, diplomacy, and legal rights in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. By examining the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States, the experience of Black migrants in Japan, Chinese women's habeas corpus litigations, and the naturalized citizenship of Chinese Americans, the forum integrates Asia and the Pacific into Civil War–era scholarship. Conceptually, the forum is informed by three strands of historiography: the international history of the Civil War era, the American West during the Civil War era, and the history of the Pacific World.

California Unbound

An enduring focus on African American chattel slavery, the U.S. Civil War, and sharecropping in the South has failed to collectively address the varieties of unfree labor and their abolitions in the trans-Mississippi western United States. By exploring systems of servitude and their termination in California and the wider Pacific World, this essay reframes the Age of Abolition. It describes the rise and fall of labor regimes that bound California Indians, African Americans, Chileans, and Chinese women. Citing Chinese-, English-, and Spanish-language sources from a variety of archives and libraries, this article expands the chronology, geography, and actors of the Age of Abolition. Finally, it suggests trajectories for rethinking this momentous transition from Pacific World and western U.S. vantage points to suggest the need for a global history of abolition.

Pacific Maritime World of Peru and Chile - Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World. By Joshua Savala. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. 248. $85.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 e-book.

Pacific Maritime World of Peru and Chile - Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World. By Joshua Savala. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. 248. $85.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 e-book.

Beyond patriotic phobias: connections, cooperation, and solidarity in the Peruvian–Chilean Pacific world

Journal Article Beyond patriotic phobias: connections, cooperation, and solidarity in the Peruvian–Chilean Pacific world Get access Beyond patriotic phobias: connections, cooperation, and solidarity in the Peruvian–Chilean Pacific world. By Joshua Savala. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2022. 248pp. £71.00. Isbn978 0 52038 589 4. Available as e-book. Philip Chrimes Philip Chrimes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 3, May 2023, Pages 1365–1366, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad087 Published: 02 May 2023

Review: Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific, by Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific, by Amanda Hendrix-Komoto Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific. By Amanda Hendrix-Komoto. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 282 pp.) Tisa Wenger Tisa Wenger Yale University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 315–316. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.315 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tisa Wenger; Review: Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific, by Amanda Hendrix-Komoto. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 315–316. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.315 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search The field of Mormon studies was once isolated, in Jan Shipps’s memorable phrase, like a “donut hole” in the larger field of U.S. Western history. Today, although many historians remain uncomfortable with the subject of religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no longer uniquely set apart. With Imperial Zions, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto adds to a burgeoning scholarship that locates Latter-day Saints as very much a part of the history of empire-building in the American West and across the Pacific world. And while the book is unevenly argued, it raises an essential set of questions that future historians of this church will be unable to ignore. Hendrix-Komoto aims to connect the Latter-day Saints’ distinctive theology and practice of plural marriage with their simultaneous participation in U.S. imperial expansion. Ideas about gender and the family, she notes, were (and still are) inextricably tied up with the racial hierarchies... You do not currently have access to this content.

Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World

Joshua Savala contends that whereas previous scholars have presupposed antagonism and conflict in Peruvian-Chilean relations, his work highlights several instances of cooperation and solidarity between Peruvians and Chileans from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. One of his main objectives in Beyond Patriotic Phobias is to decenter the War of the Pacific and its attendant nationalist excesses as the central determinant of Peruvian-Chilean relations and to demonstrate that Peruvians and Chileans who moved throughout an imagined South American Pacific world produced the possibility of cooperation and collaboration. He seeks a more positive history of the relationship between Peru and Chile while not neglecting the past conflict and antagonism between the two countries.The theme of circulation looms large in this compact book. Indeed, the author demonstrates a keen eye for the more quotidian forms of circulation between Peru and Chile, including shared ideas regarding gender relations, the spread of cholera bacteria, and the parallel development of modern policing techniques. However, it is the circulation of people, in particular the movement of nonelite Peruvian and Chilean maritime workers, that indicates for Savala the existence of a greater transnational South American Pacific world. The multinational crews of the ships and dockworkers shared common work experiences at sea and in urban port cities, and their mutual struggles during the international anarcho-syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century helped them see beyond the narrow horizon of their nation-states. Anarchism, an oceanic perspective, and transnationality thus coalesce to become Savala's framework and analytical lens.The majority male and single crews of ships inhabited a highly patriarchal space where ideas regarding gender relations and masculinity were shared by many Peruvians and Chileans. In addition to submitting women to one's sexual desire, a real man had to be strong, hardworking, and, significantly, loyal to the union. Even though the author notes the homosocial and casually homosexual nature of this maritime world, he emphasizes that women played an essential coconstitutive role in constructing the gender relations in the region, whether by interacting with men as sex workers in the port cities or, in some cases, by traveling along with them at sea. In chapter 3, “Transnational Cholera,” Savala argues that while the threat and spread of cholera in 1886–88 might have increased conflict in Peruvian-Chilean relations, the fight against the disease in fact encouraged cooperation between two distinct national medical communities, a science without borders. Savala credits the cholera outbreak with advancing state formation through the development in both Peru and Chile of state agencies, policies, and the physical infrastructure to isolate and defeat the disease. In chapter 5 the author makes a similar point regarding policing techniques, as both nation-states embarked on parallel paths to develop and share modern criminological practices, intelligence, and tighter methods of social control.For Savala, the cooperative efforts of maritime and port workers in the South American Pacific best evince the promise of transnational solidarity between Chileans and Peruvians. He selects and then analyzes three episodes of Chilean-Peruvian labor organization in Valparaíso, Chile, and Mollendo, Peru, where locals of the Industrial Workers of the World were established in 1919 and 1925, respectively. Anarchism, by definition antithetical to the nation-state, provided workers on both sides of the border with an alternative idiom through which to establish more meaningful communication and a greater sense of belonging. When Chilean ship crews backed striking Peruvian port workers in Mollendo in 1925, words and moral support turned into a successful industrial action. In a fitting epilogue, Savala carries the story forward to the 2000s and shows how Peruvian and Chilean fishermen cooperated during an acrimonious maritime dispute between the two countries.Beyond Patriotic Phobias is a welcome addition to the scholarship dealing with Peruvian-Chilean international relations. Savala cogently argues that achieving a thorough understanding of the relations between Chile and Peru requires unearthing the many occasions when people on both sides of the border cooperated to meet the challenges of modern nation-state formation. His claim that Peruvians and Chileans cocreated a Peruvian-Chilean Pacific oceanic world where this cooperation unfolded is conceptually intriguing, and his focus on port cities as key contact zones is well chosen. It is curious, though, that Arica and Iquique, two Pacific ports seized by Chile during the War of the Pacific, receive negligible attention, even though Peruvians and Chileans existed cheek by jowl in these cities through much of the period of his study. These ports and their surrounding hinterlands became sites where attempts at working-class solidarity foundered on the twin reefs of nativist politics and chauvinistic nationalism. However, it is not Savala's aim to linger on such nationalist conflict, prevalent as it was in this period. He succeeds in pointing out that despite all the discord at the nation-state level, some Peruvians and Chileans boldly opted for more cooperative and supportive forms of human association.

The Blue Beret

The Blue Beret

Mobility in an Age of Imperialism, Nation-Building, and Revolution: Kawata Masazō's Late-Nineteenth-Century Pacific World

Throughout the nineteenth century, the forces of imperialism, nationalism, and revolution were changing the world's geopolitical landscape at the same time that steamships enabled unprecedented mobility in the Pacific. This article examines Kawata Masazō's life and news reports to ask what he can tell us about how travel, foreign encounter, and intellectual exchange intersected with East Asian geopolitics just prior to the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1894. Kawata's micro-historical perspective shows that the unique nexus of relationships among Japan, Korea, and China were embedded in the deeply intertwined and contradictory tensions of imperialism, nationalism, and revolution that were playing out across multiple societies in the Pacific world. His story also shows that travel and imperialism are not always, or only, mutually supporting.

Joshua Savala, Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 248 pp.

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Baptism Between Empires: A Coast Miwok Family in the Pacific World

Scholarship has documented in detail how Spanish colonists forced California Indians to convert to Catholicism, but some Indigenous converts managed to avoid confinement in the mission system, particularly those who resided in the borderlands between Spanish and Russian settlements. This contribution to the roundtable considers the travels of one Coast Miwok family who avoided confinement and preserved local control over tribal homelands by assiduously cultivating links with Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches while holding colonial newcomers at arm's length.

Book Review: Women Photographers of the Pacific World, 1857–1930

Book review: Anne Maxwell, Women Photographers of the Pacific World, 1857–1930, New York : Routledge, 2020 . ISBN: 9781032174655, 334 pages, black and white illustrations. S oftcover $USD 48.95.

Ricardo Padrón. The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West

Ricardo Padrón. <i>The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West</i>

Exploring Sustainability through Chinese Study and Interest in the Sāmoan Language: A Situational Analysis Informed by Fa’afaletui

Sāmoa and the Pacific region has become an area of intense geostrategic importance of late. With a rising China expressing interest in the Pacific and a reposturing US, Australia and New Zealand, the success of all sustainability efforts in the region will be mediated through the lens of geopolitics. This paper intervenes in this conversation by focusing on the commitment to culture and cultural diversity articulated as part of the framework that guides the New Urban Agenda through the question of language. We explore potentiality in the recent rise of Chinese interest in Sāmoan language learning and studies as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for the preservation of Indigenous Pacific languages like Sāmoan. To answer this question, we use a blended research methodology (Sāmoan fa’afaletui framework with Situational Analysis) to map the factors that have led to the rise of Chinese interest in the Sāmoan language. In doing so, we critique the present geostrategic explanation for the BRI through presenting a nuanced model of factors and explore what space there is for Sāmoan to be promoted in places like China. This is important, the Sāmoan language, like all Pacific languages, is intrinsic to the understanding and embodiment of cultural knowledge systems that bear major significance on the sustainability and diversity of Pacific world views and ways of knowing.

Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific by Diana Looser

Reviewed by: Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific by Diana Looser Jenna Gerdsen Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific. By Diana Looser, University of Michigan Press, 2021. Cloth: $80.00, e-book: $64.95. 358 pages. In the fields of theatre and performance studies, there is a great disparity between scholarship about the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds. Scholarship on the Atlantic is so pervasive that it has informed much of our discipline. Landmark studies such as Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) inaugurated the dominant Circum-Atlantic and Hemispheric paradigms. Diana Looser's Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific is a response to growing interest in decentering hegemonic, Western epistemologies and adopting Indigenous paradigms. In her introduction, titled "Toward a Transpasifika Performance," Looser outlines how Western hegemony and militarization have informed theorizations of the Pacific world and how Pacific Islander studies scholars have challenged mappings of Oceania. Looser considers how directing attention to the Pacific world might decolonize and advance theatre and performance studies. Moving Islands answers long overdue questions: How can Western, non-Indigenous scholars holistically understand performance from the Pacific world? And what do theatre and performance illuminate about the Pacific world? Moving Islands is a thoughtful and ambitious project that examines art installations, dance dramas, theater production and performance activism of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The book consists of four case studies that collectively explore topics including real and representational Pacific voyages, Oceanian theatrical aesthetics, climate change activism, migration, diasporic community-building, urbanization and militarization. Looser uses these case studies to showcase the great potential of transpasifika, an Indigenized term that provides a theoretical lens through which to see the Pacific world relationally and that centers Indigenous and Islander perspectives. In an epilogue titled "Pacific Futures," Looser calls for a commitment to increase Pacific Islander scholarship and its presence in university curricula. Positioning herself as a Pakeha, or a white New Zealander, Looser insists that she should not be the only voice on Pacific theater and performance and asserts that a plurality of voices and a relational approach are required to fully account for the Pacific world's cultural, linguistic, political, and geographic diversity. Calling for a "wider transpacific imaginary" (25), Looser rejects continent-based schemas and adopts an island- and Indigenous-centered approach. Situated in transpacific studies and Indigenous studies, and informed by relevant discussions on how migration, hybridity, and diaspora impact constructions of Indigeneity, Moving Islands explains how people who inhabit and travel across the Pacific Ocean use theater and [End Page 97] performance to respond to environmental and economic crises, to resist imperial domination and military occupation, to form distinct ethnic and regional identities, and to create a diasporic and global network. Looser's transpasifika framework traces and illuminates the artistic diversity, coalition-building, migrations, modes of place-making, and identifications that occur across and beyond the Pacific. The book's title conveys Looser's significant scholarly intervention: she moves islands to the forefront of our imaginations of the Pacific and makes them legible in theater and performance studies. She creates a kaleidoscopic lens that allows scholars across multiple disciplines to see an intricate, dynamic, global network of people, cultures, and aesthetics. Looser models what Pacific theatre and performance should look like by supplying readers with objects, methods, and terms rooted in Indigenous cultures for understanding the Pacific world in this current era of globalization. In chapter 2, Looser analyzes stage spectacles, theater productions, dance-dramas, and art installations that represent vaka, meaning "canoe" in many languages spoken across the Pacific, by artists based in Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand. Looser presents vaka as a "genealogical vehicle that binds the bodies of those in the present to those of their seafaring ancestors" (45) and as a metaphor through which to understand Oceanian identities, cultures, and histories. Demonstrating that corporeal performance initiates and sustains ancestral and global connections, Looser prepares readers to understand the significant role performance plays in activism, community-building, and identity formation. In chapter 3 she examines the...

Review: Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World, by Malcolm Campbell

Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World is a superb piece of transnational history. For the last two decades, Malcolm Campbell’s work has stood at the vanguard of a historiographical movement to expand the focus of Irish diasporic history beyond the dominant case of the United States to consider other locations around the globe. Ireland’s Farthest Shores marks a fitting culmination to this research project.In his previous work, especially Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States, 1815–1992 (2008), Professor Campbell questioned a prevailing framework among Americanists that traced the social problems of Irish people abroad to their pre-migration culture, in particular a deeply rooted predisposition to see departure from Ireland as exile rather than opportunity. Irish immigrants struggled economically and encountered considerable animosity in the American Northeast, to be sure, yet Professor Campbell found little evidence that they did so in Australia, or for that matter in the American Midwest and West. Using tightly focused trans-regional comparative analysis, he emphasized networks of chain migration, the timing of Irish immigrants’ arrival in settler-colonial societies, the fluid and dynamic character of these societies, patterns of rural settlement, and racism against Chinese immigrants as the dominant themes in Irish American history beyond the Northeast. Exchanges of people and information between California, Australia, and New Zealand, Professor Campbell concluded, took place in the context of a Pacific Irish culture that could be analyzed through cross-regional comparisons as well as transnational interactions. This insight led to Ireland’s Farthest Shores, his broadest and most ambitious work to date.In Ireland’s Farthest Shores, Professor Campbell sets out to explain how Irish migrants shaped the Pacific World and how that world shaped them. Historians have been asking similar questions about the Atlantic World for many decades, but Professor Campbell’s geographical focus is new. He is careful and sensitive in avoiding Eurocentric myopia and bias in defining the Pacific World. Whose world was it, who defined it, and how? He is equally careful in establishing his chronological boundaries so that they do not coincide simply with the age of European incursions, even if Irish migrants were both products and agents of that process. Breaking, like his earlier work, from the nation-state paradigm that shapes many studies of immigration and ethnicity, Ireland’s Farthest Shores places its subject within the dual context of expanding empires and specific regions in the Pacific World, especially in the American West and present-day Australia and New Zealand. The first half of the book examines the process of migration, arrival, and settlement from the early sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century. The second half analyzes how Irish migrants and their descendants engaged with the host societies—principally in Anglo-Pacific regions, as that is where most of them settled—with a focus on religion, radicalism, ethnic nationalism, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and eventual integration into the host societies, in forms notably different from the dominant pattern in Irish America.Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.

African Arts — Global Conversations

African Arts — Global Conversations

Celebrating 100 Years of California History

Celebrating 100 Years of <i>California History</i>