Transpacific, Undisciplined

Book excerpt: Remaps the scope and methods of the transpacific approach Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art illuminating everyday convergences between migrant workers in Hawai‘i’s hospitality industry. By foregrounding such complex entanglements within, across, and beyond the Pacific, Transpacific, Undisciplined activates generative, if obscured, connections against fixed national and methodological boundaries and reveals how an undisciplined approach can reconfigure itself in relation to unequal exchanges among Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. With lucid contributions and a rich theoretical framework, this groundbreaking book resists geopolitical binaries to emphasize relations between peoples and populations who have long navigated imperial binds. In mobilizing the dynamic energy of the transpacific as an analytic, it brings together seemingly unrelated intellectual fields to trace across empires, local struggles, and inter-imperial intimacies. The book not only unsettles prominent discourses, it also invites discussion about unseen possibilities and new wayward histories, methods, and relations.