This dissertation focuses on the ways that contemporary poetics of the transpacific region (US, Oceania, and Guåhan/Guam) address race and racial subjectivity, by reading the poetry of six transpacific poets with and against frameworks of Black critical theory, decolonial theory, indigenous studies, and whiteness studies. The "translocal solidarity" (Rob Wilson) of Pacific-linked poetics is theorized through a conception of Oceania as a connective place, an oceanic "commons" (Epeli Hau'ofa). This cross-regional framing enables a discussion of an affiliated poetics that moves beyond bordered notions of national racial identities or nation-state derived racial subjectivity¬, in order to examine the ways that poetry across the Pacific ocean connects slavery, anti-Blackness, and colonial genocide to white supremacy and frames alternative visions to it. I argue that through poetry’s ability to voice an ontology of the self that arises from connection to the land as well as its capacity to process, rework, and dismantle language structures, poetry has an unique capacity to carry out decolonial work.

By examining the works of both Black US poets and poets addressing indigeneity and settler colonialism in the Pacific I ultimately seek to address poetry's relationship to racial subjectivity and decolonialization in the wider Pacific context, and posit racial categories as shifting, dynamic sites of intersectional identity, selfhood, and culture. I consider the historical influence of Black radicalism on Black poetics in the US and its conception of Black subjectivities on the contemporary decolonization movement in the Pacific, alongside the influence of Māori and Pacifika radical activism on transpacific poetry and its conceptions of racial subjectivities. As such I think through the unique contributions of this region, broadly construed, to global adoptions, contestations, and reimaginings of racial selfhood.