Introduction: Pacific Currents

Across currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific studies

“…In this regard, Paul Lyons and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan's discussion of a productive relationship between Native Pacific studies and American studies in their introduction to a special issue of American Quarterly titled "Pacific Currents," offers valuable arguments for the kind of relationship envisioned in our collection. 13 Borrowing from Lyons and Tengan, the essays collected here argue that bringing the Pacific and the Atlantic into a productive relation is not so much about finding ways to juxtapose the two fields, or host the one in the other, but rather about what the meeting spaces of the two potentially reveal. 14 The exploration of these intersections is therefore not intended to give currency to the field of Pacific studies only through its relation to Atlantic studies, nor does it advocate an exchange between the two solely on the basis of a productive and shared critique of American studies or the American empire.…”

Sovereignty, conservation and island ecological futures

“…On the one hand, numerous local, marginalized and indigenous communities on islands around the globe are enacting what Simpson (2014, p. 11) terms “nested sovereignties” in which diverse “political orders prevail within and apart” from the sovereign impositions of national states often founded on settler colonialism. As evidenced across islands in the Pacific and beyond (Lyons & Tengan 2015), significant movements to supersede the limited conception of political rights in the logics of Westphalian sovereignty (Knoll 2002) and to incorporate alternative conceptions (Feldman & Ticktin 2010) of the foundation of rights have emerged and are available in order to serve to organize the governance and management of biological and cultural diversity rooted in the past, lived in the present and orientated imaginatively towards the future (Hau‘ofa 1998; D'Arcy 2001; Jolly 2007). At the same time, some small-island developing states are being reconceived as vast, potent large ocean island states (Puna 2012; Rubis & Nakashima 2014) using conservation of marine spaces and their resources as a lever for assertional claims on the regional and global stage.…”

Hawaiian style graffiti and the questions of sovereignty, law, property, and ecology

“…Lyons and Tengan (2015, p. 558) also meditate on the shooting as an “act of colonial violence” contextualizing the murder in the colonial and occupational realities: “He was not shot as an American ethnic minority but as a Native person in occupied territory.”…”