Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies offers thoughtful, engaging, and provocative scholarship that together makes a valuable contribution to American studies. The book includes twelve essays and an introduction by scholars of literature, American and ethnic studies, and history who examine a transpacific that includes the Asian Pacific, Oceania, and North America. The collection builds on earlier collected works, which themselves challenged neocolonial, economic framings of the “Pacific rim,” and that used political economies, diaspora, regional networks, and vaguely defined “culture” when reenvisioning the Pacific region. The significance of this collection's contribution is in transpacific American studies, in the engagement of indigenous epistemologies, and the identification of “oceanic archives.”

The editors position the transpacific as a framing that builds upon transnationalism. The contributors define the transpacific and reveal its dynamism. Evelyn Hu-DeHart argues that the Parián District of Spanish colonial Manila was the first American Chinatown by showing how the Philippine colony was not Asian in the Spanish imagination. Rather, it became an outpost of Mexico “not … a freestanding colony of the Spanish empire” (50). Viet Thanh Nguyen highlights another transpacific dynamic: that forged between South Korea and Vietnam because of the US war in Vietnam. Nguyen argues that Korea's emergence as a wealthy cosmopolitan, yet subimperial, nation complicates the nation's efforts to memorialize Korean masculine militancy. The official war memorial effaces memories of murder to portray Korean soldiers in Vietnam in support roles. But literary and cinematic memories suggest, instead, that the Korean war in Vietnam diminished Korean masculinity. Elsewhere, Yuan Shu situates the literary career of Maxine Hong Kingston within a transpacific landscape of multiculturalism. Shu shows how Kingston draws on Chinese cosmology, a frustrated effort to recover ancient knowledge, and her American experiences to articulate an Asian American epistemology that “is not individually based or isolated but collectively related and communally oriented” (182). Craig Santos Perez pushes beyond the transpacific in his analysis of Guam as “transterritorial,” a place that remains part of the US empire and in the thick of decolonial struggles.

Indeed, this essay is one of many that use indigenous epistemologies within the transpacific to further the decolonization of culture. Santos Perez analyzes seeming Chomorro maladjustment to show that, rather, indigenous poets resist colonization, US militarization, and efforts to erase them from their homeland. Similarly, Brandy Nālani McDougall examines indigenous epistemologies in three translations of the Kumulipo, a sacred text of cosmogenesis and genealogy of the Hawaiian monarchs. Through her analysis of the translations, their authors, and the academic press that privileges haole, colonial views, McDougall reveals the crucial significance of the Kumulipo to struggles over Hawaiian sovereignty. Otto Heim draws on a broader range of transpacific, oceanic knowledge as he advocates for a new sense of interconnectedness. With reference to the work of two playwrights who use indigenous epistemology, Heim shows how webs interconnect Oceania to provide “metaphors around which people rally” (244).

Finally, this collection consciously foregrounds non-American sources and their perspectives through “oceanic archives.” These sources, the editors note, elevate “genuine alternatives to Western ontology, epistemology, and knowledge production” (2). The essays show that “oceanic archives” juxtapose new sources, unify seemingly disparate threads, or privilege indigenous perspectives and sources. Kendall Johnson does this when exploring the geographical discoveries of an antebellum American missionary in Southeast Asia and the value of his maps to a Chinese mandarin. Susan Najita contrasts Hawaiian notions of land, land use, and “the public” to those of the US Park Service. Rob Wilson uses poetry, performance, and essays to build a definition of Oceania that furthers “blue cultural studies.” Indigenous knowledge, he explains, helps us understand the larger significance of oceans, which must “figure in a more worlded vision of planetary totality” and interconnectedness if we are to respond adequately to ecological crisis (262, original emphasis). This perspective – Wilson's ecopoetics – emerges from engagement with “oceanic archives,” and it offers guidance on future activism as well as future studies. Similarly, Shelley Fisher Fishkin guides readers towards new frontiers using “deep maps.” These are collaborative, multilingual, multinational, and multidisciplinary digital oceanic archives built by scholars who collect, translate, and share sources anchored to geography, space, and time. Fishkin offers “deep maps” as one way in which scholars might respond to the enduring call to work beyond the English language, beyond North America (or Europe), and beyond imperial archives. This collection succeeds in offering examples of how to do precisely that.