Across Currents: Connections Between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies

Nicole Poppenhagen,Jens Temmen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429821509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

This book explores connections between Atlantic studies and (trans)Pacific studies, including the potential discursive, topical, and historical overlaps of the two fields. It carves out mutual concerns and theoretical affinities, but also divergent approaches and differences. While acknowledging the fundamental differences that characterize the individual fields, the essays in this volume examine how both Atlantic and (trans)Pacific studies are part of global currents of political, activist, artistic, economic, and academic exchange. This volume brings together voices from Europe, North America, and the Pacific with disciplinary backgrounds in history, culture, and literature. Directed at scholars with a background in (trans)Pacific and/or Atlantic studies, this collection is an attempt to stimulate exchange between the two fields, to intensify their impact within the current transnational focus of literary and cultural studies, to encourage the questioning of well-mapped paths of inquiry, and to outline new theoretical approaches to both fields.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Atlantic Studies.

“O Carib Isle!” or “Scattered Moluccas”? Édouard Glissant’s Pacific relation

John Carlos Rowe

ABSTRACT

Édouard Glissant is well known for his theorization of the Caribbean’s key role in our understanding of the Atlantic world, but little attention has been paid to his interest in the Pacific. This essay considers how his remarks on the Federated States of Micronesia and its economic and political dependence on the USA in the 1970s contribute to twenty-first-century theories of transpacific studies. Glissant’s interpretation of the relation between the Caribbean and Pacific anticipates the oceanic comparatism of our contemporary moment.

I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,

Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave

Squared off so carefully.

Hart Crane, “O Carib Isle!” (1927) ^*

* Permission is unobtainable

Scattered Moluccas

Not knowing, day to day

The first day’s end, in the next noon;

The placid water

Unbroken by the Simoon

Ezra Pound, “Mauberley (1920),”

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1923)

Hart Crane’s and Ezra Pound’s references to Caribbean and Pacific islands respectively in their modernist poems indicate one of the problems we face in attempting to represent accurately the complex history of these insular communities. Although some readers might excuse Crane and Pound for their misrepresentations on the grounds of poetic license and others might complain that poetry has little impact on politics, I think the cultural appropriation of island worlds has played an insidious role in rendering invisible their social realities. In what follows, I draw on the work of another important creative writer, the Martinican Édouard Glissant, whose poetics of relation provides a context for understanding Pacific communities in comparison with his own Caribbean world as a counter-narrative to the usual poetic representations of tropical islands. Recent efforts to reconceptualize island communities in oceanic, rather than continental, terms have helped these communities build important political and cultural coalitions and escape their virtual invisibility as mere specks on maps. Since Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen’s The Myth of Continents (1997), important new work has been done to establish relations among island communities in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.¹ But in our efforts to treat the “ocean” as a metaphor, we also risk universalizing the very different maritime contexts and histories of these three important locations.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2009) is one of the most important books in this new mode, especially as it interprets island cultures in the Caribbean and Pacific in historical relationships and their shared “grammar of the transoceanic imaginary.”² But DeLoughrey also tends to stress what Anthony Carrigan terms “points of commensurability” more than “dialogue” between different regions and cultures.³ There is a lingering structuralist assumption in her work of a shared code or “maritime grammar,” evident in her frequent use of the latter term: “grammar of diaspora” and “grammar of empire,” “grammar of indigenous ontology,” and “grammar of sexual fluids and exchange.”⁴ This quest for a unifying principle is even more evident in Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), which metaphorizes oceanic and insular biopolitics in contemporary theoretical terms, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism.⁵ In “Archipelagic American studies and the Archipelagic Americas,” Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens address the slippage between fact and metaphor as:

A push and pull between the metaphoric and the material, in which the concept of archipelago serves to mediate the phenomenology of humans’ cultural relation to the solid and liquid materiality of geography. Viewed from this perspective, the archipelago emerges as neither strictly natural nor as wholly cultural but always as at the intersection of the earth’s materiality and humans’ penchant for metaphoricity.⁶

The scholarly tendency both to make general claims about island cultures and to rely on unifying metaphors in a transoceanic grammar is especially noticeable in transpacific studies, a field that has emerged recently and in part influenced by transatlantic studies.⁷ Of course, studies of the island communities of the Pacific have a long, complex history, dating back at least to the seminal anthropological studies of Margaret Mead in the early twentieth century and including the Cold War area studies of the region criticized recently by Arif Dirlik, Christopher Connery, and Rob Wilson.⁸ Paul Gilroy’s seminal book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), motivated many different versions of the Atlantic – red and green, for example – as well as analogous efforts to bring attention to minoritized and diasporic communities in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and other maritime contexts.⁹ Yet Gilroy’s study is primarily concerned with the cultural and political history of the diaspora of the slave trade; none of his chapters focus on island cultures in the Atlantic or Caribbean. In fact, Caribbean studies is a necessary complement to strictly transatlantic scholarship, if we are to understand how European imperialism and slavery operated in established political economies in the Caribbean and the continents of North and South America. Scholars of the Caribbean like C. L. R. James and Édouard Glissant are often considered key figures in rethinking transatlantic studies from narrowly understood trade routes and mercantilism, however dependent on slavery, to more fundamental notions of systematic European imperialism and Creole nationalism in the western hemisphere.

Because many of these issues – diaspora, slavery, indigeneity, imperialism, capitalism, and militarism – are also crucial in transpacific studies, scholars have tried to create new conceptual maps by reading the Pacific in terms of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Chinese migration often warrants comparison with transatlantic slavery, especially when we consider the political and economic factors forcing Chinese migration and the actual enslavement of Chinese workers in many sites in the Americas. Chinese and African American workers were brutally exploited as virtual and actual slaves on the guano islands mined by the international fertilizer and saltpeter industry in the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Chinese forced to emigrate from drought and famine in mid-nineteenth-century China were excluded from basic civil rights in the USA based on the Burlingame Treaty (1868) to 1943, and they suffered a wide range of racial and class specific forms of discrimination in other regions of the hemisphere. It is tempting and often productive to compare the experiences of Chinese workers in the nineteenth-century Philippines, Hawai’i, and Cuba. In a similar manner, Chinese emigration was in many cases so prevalent, as in Guangdong Province in the mid-1840s, as to justify arguments that it was a diaspora, especially when the repressive policies of the Manchu emperors and toward these rural peasants are taken into account.¹¹

There are, then, important relations among the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific regions constituted by historical forces of indigenous settlement, imperial expansion, diaspora and (im)migration, commercial development, and environmental change. Structural resemblances remain important, of course, but they tend to be abstractions of historical factors that connect what otherwise appear to be very distinct and geographically distant island communities. Therefore, it is often productive in oceanic thinking to follow all of these routes and the relations that they constitute, rather than focusing exclusively on discrete sites. The results should produce a new kind of oceanic comparatism, focusing less on social monads and more on historical flows. For example, why and how Chinese migrants moved from southwestern China to Hawai’i, California, Cuba, and Peru should be studied in relation to their impact on indigenous communities and other migrants in those locations. If settler colonialism depends crucially on land claims and presumptive rights, then decolonization may depend more on alternative ways of understanding belonging and possession, such as in the movement of people, both in their travels and their labor.

Historians and theorists of Pacific indigeneity have discussed in considerable detail how immigrant and indigenous populations have interacted. Epeli Hau’ofa’s essays in We Are the Ocean (2008), especially “Pasts to Remember,” give us a special insight into the difficulties of distinguishing migrant and native communities, as does Hau’ofa’s own life. A Tongan born in Papua New Guinea, educated in the USA (University of New England), Canada (McGill), and Australia (Australian National University), Epeli Hau’ofa writes in response to his own migratory experience and criticism of the diverse colonial ventures that continue to produce such dislocation.¹² The same might be said of the Samoan writer Albert Wendt (Alapati Tuaopepe), whose career writing in multiple literary genres in his adopted New Zealand has advocated vigorously for indigenous rights throughout Oceania, as Paul Sharrad has demonstrated in Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature.¹³ Teresia Teaiwa (1968–2017), who was of Hawaiian (I-Kiribati) and African-American parentage, raised in Fiji, and educated in the USA, and wrote creative and scholarly work on behalf of indigenous rights in Oceania also exemplifies the complexity of “native” identity in the Pacific. Less frequently discussed in the Caribbean, the relationship between indigenous and diasporic peoples is often neglected in part because of the colonial genocide that murdered native populations. Yet Shona Jackson has argued in Creole Indigeneity that Afro-Caribbeans, among other settler societies, adapted indigenous methods and values to resist colonial repression.¹⁴

What connects the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific, then, would be less an abstract paradigm, such as scholars have attempted to adapt from Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic to understand the Pacific and Caribbean, than the human mobility crisscrossing all of these oceans. To be sure, this goal is clearly developed in DeLoughrey’s Roots and Routes, but it involves a wide range of historical interactions that cannot be covered in a single study. In addition, we have to consider how disparate colonial situations in the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific often involve shared anti-colonial agendas. Indeed, this commonality among very different island communities is at the heart of my interpretation of Glissant’s discussion of the Federated States of Micronesia in relation to his French colonial situation in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. Yet another important dimension of such comparative approaches is the impact of migration and colonialism on maritime environments and how the damage to such ecosystems affects the global health of oceans.¹⁵ In one sense, what I am terming oceanic comparatism follows the lead of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, insofar as Gilroy argues that we cannot understand West African, Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Afro-British communities without articulating their connections through the Atlantic traffic of mercantilism, the slave trade, and cultural exchange. Yet Gilroy’s focus in The Black Atlantic is primarily cultural and textual; patterns of migration and the imperial political economy built on slavery are tacit rather than explicit. And there is no ecological dimension to his cultural interpretations. The practical purpose of such comparative study of the paths of immigration, rather than focusing on discrete immigrant communities, is to create political coalitions and thus enlarge movements for social justice. In Gilroy’s work, such coalitions have usually involved Afro-British, Afro-Caribbean, and African American people.¹⁶ The coalitions required for a new anti-colonial oceanic comparatism would be far more globally encompassing.

Coalitions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Across currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific studies
• 1 “O Carib Isle!” or “Scattered Moluccas”? Édouard Glissant’s Pacific relation
• 2 Crosscurrents (three poems)
• 3 The motions of the oceans: Circulation, displacement, expansion, and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart
• 4 A mari usque ad mare: Wayde Compton’s British Columbian Afroperiphery
• 5 From the black Atlantic to the bleak Pacific: Re-reading “Benito Cereno”
• 6 “Strange beasts of the sea”: Captain Cook, the sea otter and the creation of a transoceanic American empire
• 7 Connecting Atlantic and Pacific: Theorizing the Arctic
• 8 Framing a new ocean genealogy: The case of Venetian cartography in the early modern period
• 9 Crossing oceans: an afterword
• Index