UC San Diego

This dissertation, Digesting the Empire: Embodying Life beyond Militarized Circulations across the Pacific Ocean, argues that peoples and communities in and around the Pacific Ocean both physically and metaphorically digest circulated waste materials to survive beyond the dispossession and slow violence of the US empire and its military in the modern era. Focusing on two matters—meatpacking byproducts and radioactive materials—I trace the ideological foundation for imperial expansion and its incommensurability with indigenous and diasporic communities’ worldviews and ways of life. I argue, on one hand, that scientific discourses, such as military reports and medical studies, pathologize racialized and gendered bodies as disposable and fragmentable parts. On the other hand, literary and cultural texts of survival discursively digest and resist the empire’s pollutant matters. They conceptualize a broader and more entangled sense of the “body” by imagining a future different from current forms of imperial exploitation, displacement and dispossession. Through the concept of digestion—which I theorize as the constant interactions that fold the environment into the body and resist clear demarcations of the body from its surroundings—I explore the links between knowledge, the body and the surrounding environment. This dissertation asserts that the body’s everyday acts of eating and absorbing form the basis of its knowledge and selfhood, just as visible and invisible particles constantly become a part of the body. I focus on the works of transnational Asian and Pacific Islander writers and poets such as Grace M Cho, April Naoko Heck, Craig Santos Perez and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and visual media such as South Korea’s Reply 1988, alongside radiation experimentation reports and public health reports on obesity. I argue the US empire’s ideology expressed through its military, medical and public health findings is incommensurable with people’s conceptions of themselves and their future.