Asian American critique and Moana Nui 2011: securing a future beyond empires, militarized capitalism and APEC
Candace FUJIKANE
ABSTRACT In light of the United States’ 2011 declaration of an economic and military policy refocusing on the Asia-Pacific region, Kuan-Hsing Chen’s argument for Asia as method can be expanded in Asian American critique to consider Asia and the Pacific as method. A critical analysis of Asian American settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and in the United States constitutes one such methodology that mobilizes a mode of self-reflexive inquiry in Asian American critique and conjoins it to a decolonizing and deimperializing movement in Asia and the Pacific, underscoring the need for Asian American settlers to challenge the U.S. settler state and its assault on indigenous peoples and to enact a future beyond the empires. On a global scale, U.S. settler colonialism and its seizures of indigenous lands enables and is enabled by U.S. imperialist practices in Asia and the Pacific. The Moana Nui 2011 conference in Honolulu countered the militarized capitalism of empires represented by APEC and the TPP, illustrating the ways that peoples of Asia and the Pacific can build on each other’s struggles and enact economies that will sustain us beyond empires, economies premised not on the production of scarcity that drives capitalism but on the restoration of abundance.
Keywords: Asia / Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Asian American settler colonialism, demilitarization, Moana Nui 2011, resistance movements, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Asia and the Pacific as method
Author’s biography
Candace Fujikane is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i. She is co-editor with Jonathan Okamura of Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i, a special issue of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal (2000), and Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). She is currently working on her book manuscript, Maps of Evidence: Huaka‘i Aloha ‘Āina and the Fragile Fictions of the U.S. Settler State in Hawai‘i.