Panel 6
Decolonizing oceans
Friday 7 May 2021
4:35 - 5:35 pm (PDT)
Panel speakers:
Laurel Mei-Singh
Charmaine Chua
Moderated by Chris Patterson
Pacific as Method:
Pursuing Spaciousness
Laurel Mei-Singh
This presentation develops the idea of Pacific as Method, bringing internationalist insights to burgeoning studies of the Indigenous Pacific. I demonstrate how the spatial strategies of regulation and confinement endemic to the militarization of the Pacific reach its limits when confronting Oceanic Indigeneity, meaning expansive practices of connection, fluidity, and solidarity that draw from the power of the sea. I bring ideas about “Asia as Method” (introduced by Kuan-Hsing Chen) and “Indian Ocean as Method” (introduced by Isabel Hofmeyr) in critical dialogue with Indigenous Pacific Studies. In particular, ‘Epeli Hau‘ofa’s seminal work expresses how the uncontainable power of the ocean breathes life into endeavors for self-determination that defy the confinement endemic to imperialism.
I also draw from ethnographic fieldwork in Hawai‘i, centering how contemporary demilitarization movements build solidarities and connections with occupied islands across oceans. I also explore movements that have challenged “nuclear colonialism” throughout the Pacific. This presentation centers the Pacific as a contested space to unpack the multiple anti-imperial currents that constitute the region’s contemporary formation, now confronting rising seas and heightened militarization.
THE EVER GIVEN AND THE MONSTROSITY OF MARITIME CAPITALISM
CHARMAINE CHUA
The rise of the global logistics industry has fundamentally reshaped global supply chains by organizing goods movement through a martial politics of just-in-time circulation. Although scholars have often dubbed this phenomenon "the revolution in logistics," in this talk I argue that the so-called 'logistics revolution' was not a revolution at all. Rather, it is better understood as a logistics counter-revolution.Accounts of the imperial afterlives of maritime trade tend to reify the power of managerial and state elites and the hegemonic structurations of capital, the state, and international law. Paying attention to accounts of social rebellion, unrest, and refusal in port, on board ships, and along the supply chain, I argue that what has come to be known as supply chain capitalism must be understood as a reactive and counter-revolutionary force, an effort by the state-capital nexus to forestall the ever-present potential of laboring solidarities to disrupt capitalist distribution across oceanic space. I explore the logistics counterrevolution through its negotiation of oceanic space in two ways: first, through maritime law and second, through the transoceanic organization of logistical supply chains that dissipated the laboring and decolonial solidarities forged across the TransPacific passage.