Empire and Environment (2025)

"Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of multispecies kinship: Challenging militarism and extinction in the Pacific," by Heidi Amin-Hong, Atlantic Studies, 2022

Wilson, Rob. "Toward an Ecopoetics of Oceania: Worlding the Asia-Pacific Region as Space-Time Ecumene," in American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2016)]

This essay aims to invoke the emerging Pacific regional category and the global and local vision of an ocean commons called Oceania to open the American Pacific region—and American studies—up to stronger modes of translocal solidarity, ecological alliance, and world belonging. At the core will be the projection of an environmental ecopoetics, here articulated via thinking with and beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary of Epeli Hau'ofa's works in social theory and literature, as a means of overcoming nation-centric or more absolutely racialized and bordered frameworks of Asian and Pacific identity. This ecopoetics would reframe sites like California, Hawai'i, Tai-wan, Fiji, and Okinawa and construct an affiliated poetics of transregional worlding, bioregion, and translocal solidarity that has been long enacted in " transpacific dharma wanderers " and writers like

Journal of Transnational American Studies: "Oceania as Peril and Promise: Towards a Worlded Vision of Transpacific Ecopoetics"

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2019

In effect, we need another, bigger, and better way of framing this shared oceanic horizon; that is to say, another way of converting the Pacific Rim into a shared if wary figure of geo-poetic and ecological interest, as I will go on to evoke through a conjuration of experimental poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and formally as well as in content suggests a different mode of belonging to region and globe than the post-Hegelian will-to-dominion. For, in an environmental sense as well, we can all but forget the ocean while dwelling in an urban life-world (in huge, consumption-rich cities like Shanghai, Honolulu, Kaohsiung, and San Francisco, or Berlin and London in the Northern Atlantic for that matter) that depends for its very modern well-being on, from, and across the ocean. This ocean commons so-called, if figured as a vital biospheric element necessary to sustaining life and planetary health, could help build up tactics and affects of ecological solidarity and modes of co-dwelling. To do so, the ocean would have to be framed in terms that can inspire an imagination of co-belonging, mutual interest, and care. The Pacific Ocean could come to signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a geopolitical danger zone of peril: and, as I will aim to show, the forging and worlding of an ocean-based ecopoetics can help in this regard to reconfigure city, region, ocean, river, and planet into figurative unity.

Hawaii’s Ecological Imperialism: Postcolonial Ecocriticism Reading on Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues

2019

Recent studies of postcolonialism have explored the interconnection between postcolonial and environmental/eco-criticism. Studies from Huggan (2004), Nixon (2005), Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007) counter the underlying assumption that these criticisms stand in opposition toward each other by pointing out the overlapping areas of interest between postcolonial and ecocriticism and the complementary aspect of these two criticisms (Buell, 2011). Postcolonial ecocriticism, as theorized by Huggan and Tiffin (2010) and DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) asserts the intertwined correlation between environmental degradation and the marginalization of the minority/indigenous ethic groups which inhabit a particular place. The underlying capitalist and mechanistic ideologies in which nature is perceived only of their intrinsic values and usefulness toward (Western) humans illustrates total disregard to the original owner of the colonized land, the indigenous people. This perspective is underlined by Se...

Introduction to _Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment_,(Oxford UP) 2011

Oxford University Press, 2011

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

Postcolonial Ecologies: The Cross- Pollination of Postcolonial and Environmental Studies

The Trumpeter, 2016

In this paper I will argue in favour of an intersection of interests between postcolonial and environmental studies, a convergence built on the relevance of hegemony in fully understanding the notion of place espoused by environmentalists. The catalyst for the exploration of that possible collaboration will be Rob Nixon’s discussion of the issue in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011).

We Won't Let You D(r)own -- Pacific Indigenous Art on Climate Change and the Aesthetic Turn in International Relations

This thesis explores the possible ways in which Pacific indigenous art on climate change can be conceptualized in IR. In answering this question, this study also identifies the analytical potential of the so-called Aesthetic Turn in International Relations. In order to do so, this thesis defines two potential ways in which this genre of art can be interpreted. Firstly, the suggestion is made that there is a potential for interpretation of these artworks with concepts borrowed from postcolonial and indigenous theories, such as counterhegemony, decolonization and identity-creation. Secondly, this research identifies that because the artworks address an issue of security, namely climate change, borrowing concepts from securitization theory or the field of Security Studies can be helpful. This thesis analyzes five Pacific indigenous artworks on climate change from various artforms by using the concepts of decolonization, counterhegemony, identity-creation, securitization, environmental security, human security and state sovereignty. This thesis also contributes to the current state of the debate in the Aesthetic Turn in International Relations, by identifying that there is potential for viewing art as part of the realm of politics. This potential lies in exploring non-traditional sectors in security and in working more closely with disciplines that focus on a specific artform or on a specific context.

Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2012

Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, Book Review

The Contemporary Pacific, 2019