The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Toward a Paciﬁc Civilization

Gary Y. OKIHIRO*TRANS-PACIFIC AMERICA“American Studies in Trans-Paciﬁc Perspective,” the theme commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Japanese Association for
American Studies, maps a key moment in U.S. history and in the ﬁeldof American studies, and it delineates a spatial extension of the American
experience from a decidedly Atlantic and European orientation to an
equally emphatic Paciﬁc and Asian cast, afﬁrming the fairly recent andliberating turn in American studies from an exceptionalist, interior gazeto a ﬁeld of vision across national fences. Needless to say, those more
expansive horizons accompany the current realities of increasingly
porous borders violated routinely by capital, labor, and culture, and, inthe case of the U.S., by its new nationalism that aspires toward global
dominance and empire even as it strives to shore up its borders against
the alleged danger of immigrants.1
America, as well we know, was always a transnational space in which
indigenous peoples formed themselves into nations with territories evenas they crossed those divides for thousands of years before the arrival offoreigners, aliens from Europe who later claimed nativity calling themselves “Americans” in the continent they occupied through conquest.
Despite and perhaps because of that spatial and historical fact, U.S.
Copyright © 2007 Gary Y. Okihiro. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, United States

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arbiters of the national narrative have repeatedly denied those origins of
movements, except during times of particular moment. Thus for example, during the late nineteenth century and at the noonday of U.S. overseas expansion, the nation’s leaders debated the merits of empire and its
reciprocal, the in-migration and “ﬂood” of the huddled masses of darker
southern and eastern Europe, and empire’s residues, the mixed and mongrel populations of “our new possessions,” the islands of the Caribbean
and Paciﬁc. And now, during our age of renewed U.S. aspirations for
global supremacy, post-Cold War, those same contentions of empire andits debris have gained currency in the “war against terror” and the selfsame “war against immigrants.”
In this paper, “Toward a Paciﬁc Civilization,” I intend to track that
Atlantic tradition in American studies, and posit, not in place of but in
addition to, a “trans-Paciﬁc perspective” that resists the imposed erasuresof the Eurocentric, homogenizing identity for the American species.
ATLANTIC CIVILIZATION
To ﬁnd America, go to its heartland is the usual advice. America’s
great interiors—of purple mountains and fertile valleys, of expansive
skies and rolling plains, of corn as high as an elephant’s eye and amberwaves of grain, of decent folk and honest talk and patriotism topped witha generous helping of cream. That’s the American dream, its heartland.
Surely one of the earliest and most persistent American myths involves its origin story of how Americans became Americans. Europeans,the raced, gendered, and sexualized tale begins, crossed an ocean, staggered to shore, and sowed their seed. That implantation, that encounter
between Europeans and America’s wilderness (a tangle of plants, animals, natives) was the process of Americanization, the means by which
the English, Scottish, Dutch, French became Americans.
Along the frontier, the divide between civilization and barbarism, lightand darkness, “the wilderness masters the colonist,” in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, giving him his coarseness and strength,
acuteness and inventiveness, individualism and love of freedom. Those
were among the core American virtues that were distilled within the crucible of the frontier.2
That founding myth we know from Henry Nash Smith’s classic study,
Virgin Land, was part of an agrarian tradition that turned inward andfound America’s soul in the land, the unturned sod, the exceptional envi-

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75

ronment and encounter. According to this tradition, the ocean formed aprotective moat, a barrier that allowed the American variety to develop
and grow, shielded from foreign frosts and blights. American nationalism, Smith points out, was expressed in countless “rhapsodies on theWest,” and the agrarian tradition “made it difﬁcult for Americans to thinkof themselves as members of a world community because it afﬁrmed thatthe destiny of this country leads her away from Europe toward the agricultural interior of the continent.”3
But there is a countervailing narrative, Smith informs us, of a maritime tradition that extends outward and connects America to its
European forebears and its original stock.4 Although apparently at odds
one with the other as posed by Smith, the maritime tradition is, in myview, a complementary account of America’s agrarian origins in that its
people—as a raced collective—and their institutions and culture arederivatives of European antecedents. Whether arising from agrarian or
maritime pasts, the American species is essentially European, according
to those accounts of American history.
A version of that Eurocentrism holds that America was the western
terminus of an Atlantic civilization that embraced European “cultural
hearths” and their diasporas. Columbus’ ﬁrst landing in 1492 constitutes
the beginning of this Atlantic civilization as conceived. His “discovery,”although unclear to him to his death (Columbus believed he had found
Asia and its outlying islands), ﬁxed America onto European maps thatlocated islands and the eastern shores of what became two continents bygrids of longitude and latitude. Eventually, with the global spread ofEuropeans, those coordinates would delineate and encompass the entire
world.
Europe is the genesis, the birth mother, the natal source in that rendition. American peoples and their institutions and cultures were tributaries that ﬂowed and drew from European headwaters. Herbert Baxter
Adams, a mentor of Frederick Jackson Turner at Johns Hopkins University, was an inﬂuential advocate of the “germ theory” that held thatall American institutions derived from medieval Germany and spreadwith European migrants to the New World. Indeed, Turner’s frontier
hypothesis that reversed the origin and direction of American institutions
arose, he confessed, as a reaction to Adams’ germ theory “due to myindignation.”5
Turner’s equally Eurocentric variant, however, simply stressed theAmerican side of Atlantic civilization, and the connection charted by

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GARY Y. OKIHIROColumbus between America and Europe remained the central feature ofa more global view of U.S. history. As noted by the immigration historian Marcus Lee Hansen, “the migration to America was one aspect of
the growth and spread of the population of Atlantic Europe,” wherein“Atlantic Europe” was conceived of the European peoples who bordered
the north Atlantic. Hansen, although framing the Atlantic migration from
America’s shore (that is, from a U.S.-centric point of view), describesthat movement of peoples as a reciprocal and complementary processthat was mediated by trans-Atlantic commercial networks. There was,he writes, “despair in Europe” and “hope in America.” Those corresponding attitudes propelled the Atlantic migration, and in Ireland andGermany, prosperity replaced grinding poverty, and in the U.S., pessimism succumbed to boundless conﬁdence and expectation.6
That perceived correspondence between Europe and the U.S. waslongstanding. Thomas Jefferson called it the “American system” because
America’s founding inspired the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions in states bordering the north Atlantic, creating a republican kinship that contrasted with the despotisms of central and eastern Europe.
And in 1906, Henry Adams more generously proposed the “Atlantic system,” which was a “community of interest” among the nations of thenorth Atlantic basin. Forrest Davis, writing on the eve of America’s entry
into World War II, argued that the Atlantic system was “old, rational,
and pragmatic,” that its roots ran “deep and strong into the American tradition,” and that it had emerged from “strategic and political realities.”7
The Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, exempliﬁed that common interest in defending the ties of blood and tradition.
The ocean and its shores, to some advocates of the Atlantic world,
hold much virtue as a unit of analysis. Devoid of national boundaries,
the ocean-unit foregrounds transnationalisms that fracture the binary of
the “old” and “new” world, the distinction between metropole andcolony, and insular nationalisms like American exceptionalism. The
Atlantic world, they maintain, was a system of “cultural hearths” inEurope, Africa, and the Americas that spread and interacted in complex
ways, and that therefore requires comparative and cross-cultural studies.8 Despite that postmodernist gesture toward multiculturalism, thisversion of the Atlantic world still centers Europe and the expansion of
its peoples and their deeds upon indigenous Africa and the Americas.
Herein, whites act upon non-whites.9
Paul Gilroy takes on that Eurocentrism in his The Black Atlantic. In

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truth, Gilroy tells us, the book arose from his experience trying to persuade students that history and the life of the mind held signiﬁcance for
their circumscribed interests and pursuits. “The Black Atlantic developed
from my uneven attempts to show these students that the experiences of
black people were part of the abstract modernity they found so puzzling
and to produce as evidence some of the things that black intellectuals
had said—sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest
critics—about their sense of embeddedness in the modern world.”10 In
his inﬂuential intervention, Gilroy describes a black Atlantic that was
not speciﬁcally African, American, Caribbean, or British, but one that
was all of those simultaneously transcendent of nation, race, and ethnicity and emphatically and mutably mixed and hybrid.
Although unacknowledged, Gilroy’s unit of study is the old Atlantic
world and its pedigree of the American system, Atlantic civilization, andEurocentrism. Africans within that universe become “embedded” within
European modernity, and racialization is more complicated by hybridity
but its constituent parts remain in essence black and white. Slighted are
Native Americans who preceded and were overwritten by Atlantic civilization and Asians who, like Africans, were transported to the Americas
and became thereby “embedded” in the “black Atlantic.”
What I would like to propose in this brief study is that America issurely a part of the north Atlantic world and the south black Atlantic, but
it is also a “cultural hearth” of a Paciﬁc civilization that, like its Atlantic
counterpart, is a system of ﬂows of capital, labor, and culture that produces transnational and hybrid identities as well as its counterclaims forhomogeneity, nationalism, and racial purity. In that sense, I suggest that
the U.S. is an island surrounded by lands north and south, but also oceans,east and west. And as an island, unlike the imagined insularity of theagrarian tradition and frontier hypothesis, the U.S. must be viewed properly as a center with its own integrity but also as a periphery and a ﬂuid
space of movements and engagements that resist closure and inevitable
or ﬁnal outcomes.
PACIFIC CIVILIZATION
Indeed, as ﬁgured in Atlantic civilization, America’s very “discovery”
resulted from a transnational project—Europe’s ancient and persistentsearch for a passage to Asia. As noted by Christopher Columbus in his
ship’s daily log, his expedition’s purpose was to go “to the regions of

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India, to see the Princes there and the peoples and the lands, and to learnof their disposition, and of everything, and the measures which could betaken for their conversion to our Holy Faith.”11 In 1513, Spain’s Vasco
Nuñez de Balboa traversed Panama’s isthmus, waded into the Gulf of
San Miguel after waiting for hours for the tide to come in for a photogenic moment, gazed across the Mar del Sur (the South Sea) toward Asia,and issued the absurdly grandiose claim of “real and corporeal and actual
possession of these seas and lands and coasts and ports and islands ofthe south, and all their annexures and kingdoms and provinces to thempertaining . . . in the name of the Kings of Castile present or to come . . .
both now and in all times, as long as the world endures until the ﬁnal dayof judgement [sic] of mortal man.”12
A consequence of American and European mappings of the Paciﬁc
was the outﬂow of Asia’s peoples, mainly laborers, to America. The
peripheries were thereby drawn toward the core along the Paciﬁc’s rim.
Apt is the metaphor of a ship, as pointed out by Paul Gilroy, “a living,
micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion. . . .” Ships, Gilroy
explained, shift attention from the shore to the middle passage and thecirculation of people, ideas, and culture.13
Images come to mind of Filipino and Chinese seamen on board
Spanish galleons beginning in 1565, and Hawaiian sailors who, during
the 1830s, comprised the majority of the crews on American ships thatcarried animal furs from America’s Paciﬁc Northwest to Canton,
China.14 Those were the forerunners of Asian migrants today who arecalled “trapeze artists” in Chinese because they hang suspended over the
Paciﬁc between the U.S. and Asia. With the focus on the crossing, theirfrequency and multiple directions, the parents are called “astronauts” andtheir children, “parachute kids” who land in America to attend school.
And cultures, like peoples, dart across the Paciﬁc’s expanses and defy
easy capture and labels. Can the Hong Kong, Jackie Chan movies so popular in America be classed as Asian cinema, and is Taiwan-born director Ang Lee’s ﬁlming of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) atranslation? When Japanese capital in the form of Sony and Nissan locate
their plants in the U.S. their products bear the label “Made in America,”and Sony’s Akio Morita told Newsweek’s readers, when his company
bought Columbia Pictures in 1989, “We are still expanding our facilities
in this country [the U.S.]. I don’t like the word ‘multinational.’ I don’tknow what it means. I created a new term: ‘global localization.’ That’s
our new slogan.”15

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79

Those new natives, like the old imperialists and expatriates, assume
the names of the indigenous peoples, allowing them to make claims upon
the land as if it were their own. Thus Europeans become native
Americans and Asian capital make American products. The Native Sons
(and Daughters) of the Golden West—white American and European
immigrants to California following the gold rush—designated themselves as natives, and then sought to expel aliens and foreigners—
Chinese who were like them migrants, but also Mexicans and Californios
who had preceded them in Mexico’s far north and who, in turn, had
staked claims in disregard of the original caretakers of the land,
America’s Indians.
And seen from Asia’s shore, Asian migration to America constituted
an Asian diaspora from the Asian core to American peripheries, from
Asian cultural hearths to American cultural hearths. Indeed, this paper’s
archaeology, from my reading of Andre Gunder Frank, is Eurocentricand ahistorical. In his remapping of the world economy, Frank proposesthat Asia, including China, India, Persia, and Turkey, were the major
centers of a global system that long predated Europe’s rise. “Europe,”
Frank notes, “climbed up on the back of Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders—temporarily.”16 Its search for Asia was as a supplicant, not a master, and Europe was dependent upon silver drawn mainly from Mexicoand Peru to initiate trade with Asia, cover its perennial deﬁcits, and rectify its Asian trade imbalance. Europeans served as brokers between Asia
and America, Africa, and Europe in an expanded world-system that centered on China and India. In the eighteenth century, Frank reminds us,
the well-known Atlantic trade triangle was in fact an adjunct of the AfroEurasian trade in which Europeans exchanged Indian textiles andEuropean manufactures for African slaves who produced America’s
sugar, tobacco, and other goods exported to Europe. Economic decline,
political instability, and European conquest and colonialism in Asia andthe silver and gold mined in America by enslaved Indians and Africans
in America led to Europe’s preeminence that lasted for less than two centuries, a brief interlude in Asia’s dominance from 1500 to 1800 and again
in our time.
Frank poses in this study a provocative challenge to Eurocentrism in
the works of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein,17 but Asiacentrism, like Eurocentrism, disallows other centers and slights the margins that pose resistances to the more glaring hegemonies. Similarly, in
my present bid for a Paciﬁc civilization and its absorption with the80

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crossing, I can easily lose sight of those who have made the ocean theirhome, the place of their nativity.
The Paciﬁc is not a negative space between continents or the hole ina doughnut, the breakfast food of champions and a tasty trope for the
Paciﬁc’s rim. Niuean poet John Pahiatua Pule reﬂected upon that absence
and Henry Kissinger’s comment when asked about U.S. nuclear tests on
the Marshall Islands, “There are only 90,000 people out there, who gives
a damn?”I look at the map of the Paciﬁc.
The American navy calls the Paciﬁc the American Lake.
They have ships in Samoa
Hawaii, Taiwan, Philippines,
Belau, Kwajalein, Trukthe Mariannas, the Carolines.
In Micronesia there are only 90,000 people,
who gives a damn?
The dead are louder in protest than the living.
The living are silent.
Everything is silent.18

Samoan novelist and university professor Albert Wendt rejected the“fatal impact theory” of colonial literature that pronounced the death ofnative cultures with the arrival of the Europeans. “We and our cultures
have survived and adapted when we were expected to die, vanish, under
the inﬂuence of supposedly stronger superior cultures and their technologies,” he wrote. “Our story of the Paciﬁc is that of marvelous
endurance, survival and dynamic adaptation, despite enormous suffering
under colonialism in some of our countries. We have survived throughour own efforts and ingenuity. We have indigenised much that was colonial or foreign to suit ourselves, creating new blends and forms.”19
Instead of conceiving the Paciﬁc as “the last and greatest unknown
quantity” from the drawing tables of European map makers,20 we might
conceive of Paciﬁc civilization as “Oceania” as appropriated and reconceived by the Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa who distinguishes between“Paciﬁc islands” and “Oceania.”21 The former, he observes, denotes tiny
bits of land and reefs surrounded by a vast and empty ocean, whereas
the latter conjures a “sea of islands” and their inhabitants. “Theirs was alarge world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers,”

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wrote Hau‘ofa of Oceania’s peoples. “From one island to another theysailed to trade and to marry, thereby expanding social networks for
greater ﬂows of wealth. They traveled to visit relatives in a wide varietyof natural and cultural surroundings, to quench their thirst for adventure,and even to ﬁght and dominate.” The sea, before Europeans, had no
exclusionary laws, fences, or border patrols or imaginary cartographic
lines, “but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and evencontested. The sea was open to anyone who could navigate a way
through.” It was imperialism that erected boundaries, created islandstates and territories, and conﬁned people to restricted spaces isolated
from each other.22
The efﬁcacy of an Oceania identity, Hau‘ofa tells his readers, rests in
its ability to steer clear of the “reef of our diversity” and the imposedalienations of nation states and to promote a consciousness “that would
help free us from the prevailing, externally generated deﬁnitions of ourpast, present, and future.”23 That capacious apprehension, Hau‘ofa cautions, is not in place of but in addition to Oceania’s diverse ethnicities
that counter the homogenizing forces of global culture. A regional identity offers a powerful antidote to the caricatures of noble savage, lost anddebased souls, and helpless pawns in the conﬂicts between civil and savage, Christianity and barbarism, and West and East. With the advent of
the Paciﬁc century, Hauo‘fa points out, “our erstwhile suitors are now
creating with others along the rim of our ocean a new set of relationshipsthat excludes us totally.”24 That exclusion has relevance to Oceania’s
very survival, including nuclear tests that poison both land and sea,
depletions of ﬁsheries and the ocean’s resources, and mutilations of cultural identities.
The assertion of Oceania, thus, is in resistance to the blank space created by Euro- and Asia-centrisms and evokes the freedoms of the boundless, restless sea. “Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is
hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths ofbrine and regions of ﬁre deeper still, Oceania is us,” Hau‘ofa exhorts.
“We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth
and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately
to conﬁne us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spacesthat we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places, and fromwhich we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone
to belittle us again, and take away our freedom.”25

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GARY Y. OKIHIROATLANTIC/PACIFIC “CIVILIZATIONS”
In truth, whether conceiving of Paciﬁc civilization as an overarchinghegemony of Europe and the U.S. or Asia or as a resistance to colonialism
through an Oceania identity, there is no Paciﬁc region as an “objective”
given, as pointed out by historian and cultural critic Arif Dirlik, only “acompeting set of ideational constructs that project upon a certain locationon the globe the imperatives of interest, power, or vision of these historically produced relationships.”26 And as such, those discourses are notsimply plural but are oppositional in relations of power, one seeking
dominion and the other resisting that imposition. Within the idea of the
Paciﬁc, hegemony is commonly rendered as global while resistance,
local.27 There is much virtue to the construct, especially because it positions Oceania’s peoples against the activities over, through, and upon the
Paciﬁc by peoples along the rim—Europeans, Americans, and Asians.
But there are multiple meanings to “local,” as when Hawaiian activists
distinguish between “indigenous” and “local” and therewith rights andprivileges, or when multinationals like Sony assimilate and assume thename and form of natives through “global localization.” Dirlik thus urges
a “critical localism” that simultaneously rejects essentialist notions ofindigenous cultures and the glossings of globalism.28
Paciﬁc civilization is both global and local, a crossing and a home. It
is multiply positioned and occupied. Sighted from the U.S. shore, thePaciﬁc marks the continent’s edge and the ocean’s uncharted expanses.
It is the vast unknown. It is the other ocean. The Atlantic is the self—familiar and raced European, whereas the Paciﬁc is the other—alien andraced Asian. And yet Asia has weighed on the minds of Europeans aspart of their patrimony and destiny, as an opportunity and “open door.”
But Asia also poses a threat to white supremacy. The Atlantic allianceconfronts the Paciﬁc menace. In the nineteenth-century European imaginary, the “yellow peril” threatened to swamp European civilization andChristianity, and in the late twentieth century it strived to usurp capitalism and Western civilization and complete the unﬁnished business that
allegedly began with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.29
Atlantic civilization, whether white or black, creates binaries that havebeen integral to the U.S. social and racial formations. The white Atlantic
features a Eurocentrism that positions the U.S. as a correlate of European
civilization, while the African diaspora (or the black Atlantic) mitigates
Eurocentrism but also reinscribes the racial dualism of black and white.

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This article proposes a Paciﬁc civilization not to displace Atlantic
civilization, but to intervene in the binaries of Eurocentrism and race.
America has, since its “discovery,” found its manifest destiny in westering, in its thrust toward Asia, and Asians have, like their African diasporic counterparts, been captured and recruited for the plantations of the“new world.” The U.S. is equally an Atlantic as well as a Paciﬁc civilization. That recognition allows for multiplicities within the U.S. socialand racial formations that contradict the Republic’s foundational binaries. (It also releases Africa from the Atlantic to an embrace of its Indian
Ocean civilization and ties with Asia.)
Yet that notion of a Paciﬁc civilization, if centered around the “self”
of the U.S., establishes another binary of the U.S. and “others” that
reduces as local social relations, which are global while privileging the“self” (the U.S.). It might also inspire a white and yellow racial binary(white North America and yellow East Asia) and a rim-centered
American and Asian binary that slights the transnational ocean and thepeoples of Oceania (and Asians other than East Asians). And why add
Paciﬁc civilization to Atlantic civilization when the very idea of “civilization” is bloated with Eurocentric, developmental, and hegemonic
meanings? The “burden” (and challenge), thus, of constructing a Paciﬁccivilization is simultaneously to disrupt the hegemonies of Atlantic civilization and describe alternatives that avoid replicating old or conjuring
new hierarchies.
NOTES
A version of this paper was published in Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglou,and Linda Manney (eds.), Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a
Globalized World (Heidelberg, Germany: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2006), 15–25.
1
See e.g., the Bush regime’s The National Security Strategy of the United States ofAmerica, September 2002; the moving of immigration from Justice to Homeland
Security, the national debate and mass public protests in 2005–06 around H. R. 4437
Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 known
as the Sensenbrenner Bill; and Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire; Geographiesof Intimacy in North American History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
2
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920), 1, 2, 3.
3Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950), 4, 11, 260.
4
Ibid., 6–8, 12.
5Turner, Frontier, 38.
6
Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1945), 17, 286, 305.

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Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of Anglo-American Control of theSeas (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), xi, xii.
8
Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill (eds.), Atlantic American Societies: From
Columbus Through Abolition, 1492–1888 (London: Routledge, 1992), 4–6.
9
A similar critique has been leveled at Orientalism. See, e.g., A. L. Macﬁe (ed.),Orientalism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
10Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), ix.
11
The Log of Christopher Columbus, translated by Robert H. Fuson (Camden, Maine:
International Marine, 1987), 51.
12O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1979), 1, 32, 33.
13
Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4. On traveling cultures, encounters, and translations, seeJames Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
14
On Paciﬁc islanders on European ships, see David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts:
Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997);
Richard H. Dillon, “Kanaka Colonies in California,” Paciﬁc Historical Review 24(February 1955): 17–23; Janice K. Duncan, “Kanaka World Travelers and Fur Company
Employees, 1785–1860,” Hawaiian Journal of History 7 (1973): 93–111; and Tom
Koppel, Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the
Paciﬁc Northwest (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1995).
15
Newsweek, October 9, 1989, 66. See, Sau-Ling C. Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia
Journal 21:1/2 (1995): 6–7.
16
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 5. For a review of books that counter the idea ofEuropean initiatives, see John E. Wills, Jr., “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive
Emergence of European Domination,” American Historical Review 98:1 (February1993): 83–105.
17
For example, Fernand Braudel’s three volume, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–
18th Century, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s three volume, The Modern World System.
18
John Pahiatua Pule, The Shark that Ate the Sun (Auckland: Penguin New Zealand,1992), 73–75.
19
Albert Wendt (ed.), Nuanua: Paciﬁc Writing in English Since 1980 (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 3.
20
Spate, Spanish Lake, 24.
21
Hauo‘fa cites as a landmark in this new idea of Oceania the pioneering essay byAlbert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” ﬁrst published in Mana 1:1 (January 1976):
49–60.
22
Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Paciﬁc 6:1 (Spring 1994):
153–54, 155.
23
Epeli Hau‘ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” in Voyaging Through the Contemporary Paciﬁc,edited by David Hanlon and Geoffrey M. White (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &Littleﬁeld, 2000), 113.
24
Ibid., 119. For an exposition on Paciﬁc rim discourse as an American construct during late capitalism and the late cold war years, see Christopher L. Connery, “Paciﬁc Rim
Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years,” in Asia/Paciﬁc asSpace of Cultural Production, edited by Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (Durham, North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), 30–56.
7

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25

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Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea,” 160.
Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Paciﬁc Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention ofa Regional Structure,” Journal of World History 3:1 (Spring 1992): 56.
27
See e.g., Peter Hempenstall and Noel Rutherford, Protest and Dissent in theColonial Paciﬁc (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Paciﬁc Studies of the University of the South
Paciﬁc, 1984); and Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc: From South Paciﬁc
to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000).
For a sophisticated account of the engagement, see Martha Kaplan, Neither Cargo Nor
Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 1995).
28
Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production andthe Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996), 21–45. See also, Wilson, Reimagining,
11, 22, 148–49.
29
See e.g., Pierton W. Dooner, The Last Days of the Republic (San Francisco: Alta
California, 1880); Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1909); George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War With Japan (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations andthe Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Richard
Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conﬂict With China (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997).
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