New Analyses of Asian Settler Colonialism through the Lens of the Gendered Trans-Pacific World

As scholars of American Orientalism have demonstrated, the Trans-Pacific World already is inherently gendered as both an imaginary and an actual site of diverse economic, political, and cultural interactions. Understanding how the Trans-Pacific World has long been gendered provides insights about the specific material effects of settler colonialism and its accompanying processes of exploitation and extraction upon the bodies of populations marginalized within this eco-political system.

Leong will identify scholarship that has addressed why the gendering of the Trans-Pacific World matters in explorations of geopolitical formations, migration flows and policies. Chandan Reddy, for example, in Freedom with Violence, proposes exploring the Black Pacific as a sociohistorical formation of resistance in contrast to the systems of oppression and inequality generated by the Black Atlantic. Martin Manalansan’s work suggests that the migration of gay male Pinoys may be motivated by the promises of freedom of sexual expression—requiring us to address how gender and sexuality also articulates in Trans-Pacific flows. At the same time, Keith Camacho and other scholars of Oceania urged us to explore how Oceania as a political, economic, and social formation in its own right has shaped interactions with land-based continents and communities.

Leong will then apply these framings of the gendered Trans-Pacific world to her own collaborative research project about Japanese American and American Indian relational history during World War II. How does framing this specific relational history as a gendered story of empire and nations, transform and expand our understanding of the processes that resulted in the incarcerated Japanese Americans becoming unlikely (but not unsurprising) neighbors of American Indians in Arizona during World War II?