Project Abstract
By providing social scientific grounding to how U.S. imperialism shapes and is shaped by race and indigeneity in the Pacific, this project joins the scholars, activists, and artists who are envisioning alternatives to a militarized Pacific. Two questions guide our research: (1) What understandings of race, nation, and indigeneity do U.S. imperial state actors employ in imperial and military policy? And (2) what on-the-ground, race-making, and Indigenous solidarities develop through and in response to military imperialism? Through top-down (katrina Quisumbing King) and bottom-up (Nitasha Tamar Sharma) analysis, we interrogate how powerful state actors and everyday people work in local and transnational collectives across the TransPacific region toward a de/militarized Pacific.
While the first question requires us to develop new archival methodological skills, we bring to the second question our expertise in ethnographic research. Seed funds will allow us to travel to key sites that house U.S. military bases and that are current centers of local and Trans-Pacific demilitarism efforts to learn two things, divided by our specific areas of expertise. Quisumbing King will address the first research question, analyzing how key U.S. state actors, including politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and military officials, made sense of difference and imposed unequal regimes in their imperial outposts. Sharma provides a counterpoint through her bottom-up approach, addressing the second question. She will analyze the impacts and negotiations of local Pacific Islanders who navigate and contest the effects of militarism and colonialism by posing alternatives.
“Race, Indigeneity, and De/Militarism in the Pacific” joins a growing body of scholars, antinuclearism feminists and activists, and artists who are invested in alternatives to militarism in the Pacific. Both scholars will work together to reveal how ideas of race and indigeneity shape the operations of militarism and resistance to it. Quisumbing King’s work will provide historical and structural context, detailing how military and state officials constructed ideas of the Pacific region as geostrategically important and Pacific people as expendable. Along with explaining how ideas of racial difference are fundamental to the operations of militarism across the Pacific, Sharma’s contributions will highlight the solidarities that disrupt and challenge imperial powers by focusing on how local actors are developing sustainable alternatives to militarism. We thus propose charting both the narrative arc that justified the U.S. military occupation across the Pacific while we are dedicated to detailing local resistance to this process through the assertion of local, regional, and trans-national movements for demilitarism.
Investigators
Nitasha Sharma
Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of Asian American Studies and Black Studies at Northwestern University. She is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program and co-directs the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies as well as the Comparative Race and Diaspora Cluster. Sharma is the author of two books, Hip Hop Desis and Hawai’i Is My Haven, and the co-editor of New Politics of Race in Hawai’i and Who Is the Asianist. Nitasha is an Associate Editor of American Quarterly.
katrina quisumbing king
Katrina Quisumbing King (surname: Quisumbing King, pronounced kiss-uhm-bing king) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. She studies racial classification and exclusion from a historical perspective that foregrounds the state’s authority to manage populations. She is particularly interested in the ways state actors conceive of and make decisions around race and citizenship. Her research recenters empire as a key political formation. In the U.S. context, she focuses especially on how the state defines colonized populations and how these people fit into the U.S. racial order. Professor Quisumbing King earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2018. Prior to joining Northwestern, she spent two years as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at University of Southern California.