Cold War, Global Warming, and Transoceanic Feminism: Theorizing the Black Pacific

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines how anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure subtend Cold War militarisms. By reading the poems of Teresia Teaiwa, Déwé Gorodé, and Grace Mera Molisa within a Black Pacific framework, I argue their poems model a transoceanic feminism to trace the continuities between Cold War militarisms and global warming.KEYWORDS: Black PacificCold Wartransoceanic feminism Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Joey Tau and Talei Luscia Mangioni, “If It’s Safe, Dump It in Tokyo. We in the Pacific Don’t Want Japan’s Nuclear Wastewater,” The Guardian, April 26, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/if-its-safe-dump-it-in-tokyo-we-in-the-pacific-dont-want-japans-nuclear-wastewater (accessed March 24, 2023).2. Since writing this essay, Japan has proceeded with dumping its nuclear wastewater into the Pacific, provoking grassroots protests across South Korea, Fiji, and within Japan itself. Japan’s decision also has incurred condemnation from Pacific leaders, including the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), which noted that Japan proceeded with dumping nuclear wastewater before a scientific team from the Pacific Islands Forum could validate the safety of the wastewater disposal plan approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On Fiji protests and the MSG’s disapproval, see Ravindra Singh Prasad, “Fiji: Outrage at Japan Dumping Fukushima Waters into the Pacific Ocean,” IDN – InDepth News, August 26, 2023, https://indepthnews.net/fiji-outrage-at-japan-dumping-fukushima-waters-into-the-pacific-ocean/.3. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna, “Rise: From One Island to Another,” 350.org, https://350.org/rise-from-one-island-to-another/#poem.4. Quito Swan’s work shows how groups such as the Women’s Wing, led by Hilda Lini, aligned Indigenous Pasifik movements with Black Power in the Pacific while insisting on the centering of women’s rights in achieving liberation. See Quito Swan, “Giving Berth: Fiji, Black Women’s Internationalism, and the Pacific Women’s Conference in 1975,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): 37–63.5. Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 15.6. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 3.7. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific Question’,” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 123–43.8. Erin Suzuki, Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021).9. Michelle Keown, “Waves of Destruction: Nuclear Imperialism and Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Indigenous Literatures of the Pacific,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 5 (2018): 585–600.10. Swan, “Giving Berth,” 38.11. Joy Enomoto, “Black Is the Color of Solidarity: Art as Resistance in Melanesia,” Postmodern Culture 31, no. 1 (2020), DOI:10.1353/pmc.2020.0027.12. Bernida Webb-Binder, “Affinities and Affiliations: Black Pacific Art in the United States and Aotorea/New Zealand, 1948–2008” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2016), 16.13. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique no. 6 (Spring 1987): 52.14. While I do not have the space to cover the full debate within this paper, the field of Black Pacific studies has developed along two lines of inquiry that at times run parallel, the one focusing on Blackness and Indigeneity in Oceania, and the other focusing on U.S. Black soldiers and African American writings on the Pacific Rim countries. The present essay draws on scholarship from the former to illumine the overlooked racial logics and sites of Cold War U.S. militarism and imperialism that scholars respond to in the latter. For work on U.S. militarism and African American writings on the Pacific, see Michael Cullen Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010); Bernard Scott Lucious, “In the Black Pacific: Testimonies of Vietnamese Afro-Amerasian Displacements,” in Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas, ed. Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005), 122–55; Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Etsuko Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014); and Vince Schleitwiler, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives (New York: New York University Press, 2017).15. Gary Okihiro, “Toward a Black Pacific,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, and Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 321.16. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, “Re-Presenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian Alter-Natives,” The Contemporary Pacific 27, no. 1 (2015): 121.17. Enomoto, “Black Is the Color of Solidarity.”18. Ibid., n. 2.19. Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 6.20. See Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Quito Swan, “Giving Berth”; and Quito Swan, Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World (New York: New York University Press, 2022). For a critique of Shilliam’s framing of the Polynesian Panthers as a “Black” power movement, given the racialization of Polynesians in the Pacific, see Ponipate Rokolekutu, “Heterogeneity, Race and Genealogical Connection of Spiritual Hinterlands,” in The Black Pacific: Forum, Critiques, Responses, February 7, 2016, robbieshilliam.wordpress.com, https://robbieshilliam.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/the-black-pacific-forum-critiques-responses/ (accessed January 2, 2022).21. See note 17 above.22. Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Hawai‘i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5.23. Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific Question’.”24. Stephanie Nohelani Teves and Maile Arvin, “Decolonizing API: Centering Indigenous Pacific Islander Feminism,” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, ed. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 107–137, 114.25. In a deeply moving account of the Protect Mauna Kea movement and what it means to engage in Indigenous reciprocity with the struggles of Indigenous people elsewhere, Kanaka Maoli scholar and poet Emalani Case writes, “When I heard about Ihumātao, I felt an even greater responsbility to stand as a kia’i, knowing that no matter where I was in the world, I had to align myself with actions and efforts aimed at protecting land and water everywhere. These movements, I realized, were not about us as individuals but about securing a future for our descendents.” See Emalani Case, Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2021), 10.26. Audre Lorde, “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 189. Emphasis mine.27. Teaiwa, Preface to Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa (Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications, 1995), ix.28. Teaiwa, “Travellers,” in Searching for Nei Nim‘Anoa, 4.29. Teresia Teaiwa, Introduction to “Black and Blue in the Pacific: Afro-Diasporic Women Artists on History and Blackness,” Amerasia Journal 43, no. 1 (2017): 145–193, DOI:10.17953/aj.43.1.145–192, 177146, 146.30. While Taketani’s concept of the “Black Pacific” as a literary space produced by African American narratives of the Pacific differs from my own idea of the “Black Pacific,” I find her insight about the role of black Pacific narratives in countering bioceanic empires richly generative. As Taketani points out, the construction of the Panama Canal in 1904 connected the Pacific and Atlantic worlds routed through the Caribbean, bringing about a “spatial reorientation to America’s worldview,” that through waterways formed an “imperial archipelago [that] thus secured the position of the United States as a bioceanic empire.” See Etsuko Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 8.31. Teresia Teaiwa, “Black in the Blue Pacific (For Mohit and Riyad),” Social and Economic Studies 56, no. 1/2 (March/June 2007): n.p. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27866493. The virgules are in the original text.32. Ibid.33. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva, Fiji: The University of the South Pacific, 1993), 7.34. As Molisa notes in her preface, readers can sound out Bislama by reading the words out loud phonetically. Out of respect for her Indigenous linguistic intervention, I will not transliterate any quotes. The reader is welcome to sound out the words.35. Molisa, “Vanuatu,” in Pasifik Paradaes (Port Vila, Vanuatu: Blackstone Publishing, 1995), 8.36. Molisa, “Melanesia,” in Pasifik Paradaes, 9.37. Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 17.38. See note 36 above.39. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 10.40. Teresia Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15–32.41. Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania, Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 204.42. Teaiwa, “Foremothers,” in Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa, 8.43. Shilliam, The Black Pacific, 20–21.44. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 173.45. Ibid., 146.46. Molisa, Preface to Pasifik Paradaes, 7.47. Swan, “Giving Berth,” 54.48. Molisa, “CEDAW: Womens Raets are Human Raets,” in Pasifik Paradaes, 22–23.49. Molisa, “Fuja Vanuatu Sosaeti,” in Pasifik Paradaes, 28.50. Quoted in Teaiwa, “Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 254.51. Molisa, “Turism,” in Pasifik Paradaes, 13.52. Ibid.53. As JA Maynard and TJ Done find in their study, the coral colonies at both sites were 30% bleached in April 2008. They further caution that dive operations are accelerating the rates of coral bleaching, with divers walking and swimming over vulnerable reefs. See JA Maynard and TJ Done, “Further Bouts of Bleaching and Errant Shore Divers Worsen Recovery Rates at Million Dollar Point and the SS President Coolidge, Vanuatu,” Coral Reefs 27, no. 975 (2008), https://doi-org.pitt.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/s00338-008-0397-0.54. The 1998 Noumea Accord promised recognition of increased political power of the Kanaks by the French Republic. The agreement changed New Caledonia’s status from a territoire d’outre-mer (TOM), or overseas territory, to pays d’outre mer (POM), or overseas country. However, with French administration of the military, foreign policy, immigration, policing, and currency intact, and given the “unresolved nature” of New Caledonia’s status, it remains essentially a territory. See Peter Brown, Introduction to Selected Poems of Déwé Gorodé: Sharing as Custom Provides, trans. and ed. Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker (Canberra, Australia: Pandanus Books, 2004), xxxviii, n.1.55. Swan, “Giving Berth,” 53.56. Keown, “Waves of Destruction,” 590.57. Gorodé, “Wave-Song,” in Sharing as Custom Provides, 42–43.58. Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna, “Rise.”59. Ibid.Additional informationNotes on contributorsNozomi (Nakaganeku) SaitoNozomi (Nakaganeku) Saito is a Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Amherst College, where she will transition to a tenure-track position in Asian and Pacific American literature in July 2024. Her research examines the intersections of Cold War militarisms, settler colonialism, and race and Indigeneity in Okinawa and Black Pacific studies.