UC Santa Cruz

Examining Micronesia as an arena of twentieth-century imperial rivalry, my dissertation approaches the region, especially the Marshall Islands, as a space unsettled by past and present imperialisms that manifest uneasily on the terrain of post-1945 Japanese and American literature and popular culture. Imperial Japan’s construction of the southern Pacific area as Nanyō and the U.S. notion of the South Pacific signaled, as my dissertation demonstrates, an overlay of competing imperial ambitions and racialized, gendered geopolitics in the early part of the twentieth century. After its defeat, Japanese cultural texts that invoke Micronesia are often suffused with post-imperialist nostalgia, whereas U.S. cultural texts register the anxiety of imperial dominance specific to its regional nuclear militarism. My dissertation draws on yet departs from scholars of the Pacific who have challenged the Eurocentrism of existing scholarship on the region. Few scholars comparatively examine how U.S. and Japanese colonial ideologies encoded domination along gendered, sexualized, and racialized lines, much less consider the convergence and competition of these two heteronormative imperial projects in the Pacific. “Unsettled Empires” intervenes by focusing on the gendered implications of these vying imperial dominations. My multilingual investigation moreover challenges the monolingualism of research on the Pacific, which persists even in recent studies. My project’s comparative focus on and deep archival investigation of Japanese-language materials represents a critical step toward the deconstruction of the linguistic Anglo-centrism of postcolonial Pacific studies.