Congratulations to GRSJ’s Christopher Patterson on the publication of Transpacific Undisciplined (University of Washington Press). He is co-editor along with Lily Wong, associate professor in the departments of Literature and Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies at American University and Chien-ting Lin is associate professor in the English Department and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies graduate program at National Central University in Taiwan.
More about the book
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.
“This superb collection deepens and necessarily challenges our understanding of the 'transpacific.' It unmoors the transpacific from fixed disciplinary boundaries while demonstrating the intellectual stakes of critical scholarship that tracks the convergences between imperialism, militarization, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.”
