Transpacific, Undisciplined

Remaps the scope and methods of the transpacific approach

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.

Lily Wong is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018).Patterson Christopher B. :

Christopher B. Patterson is associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020) and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (2018). Under his pen name Kawika Guillermo, he has published Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press, 2023), Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018), and All Flowers Bloom (Westphalia Press, 2020).Lin Chien-ting :

Chien-ting Lin is an associate professor in the English Department at National Central University in Taiwan. He received his PhD in literature and cultural studies from University of California, San Diego, and has published articles in English and Chinese in several journals, including Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Review of International American Studies, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Lily Wong is associate professor in the departments of Literature and Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies at American University. She is author of Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness. Christopher B. Patterson is associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. Chien-ting Lin is associate professor in the English Department and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies graduate program at National Central University in Taiwan.

"Transpacific, Undisciplined brings together the multifarious, often incommensurable politico-intellectual engagements and inquiries in and across Asias, Americas, and the Pacific Ocean/Islands, illuminating their connections and entanglements that are disavowed by the disciplinary division yet remain as critical undercurrents for alternative geohistorical imaginaries. Anticipating the perils of redisciplinization currently facing Transpacific studies, in which “transpacific" is reduced to a new name for conventional academic practices, Transpacific, Undisciplined boldly insists on the imperative that transpacific analytics remains vitally unsettling to offer unruly visions of decolonial futures to come. Deeply dialogic and caring for the unknown, Transpacific, Undisciplined is a critical collaborative thinking at its best."—Lisa Yoneyama, author of Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes

Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique:

"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."