“How might centering the Pacific in transpacific studies foreground points of intersection between Indigenous displacements and Asian migrations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?” (p. 3), Erin Suzuki asks in Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures. This encapsulates one of the main criticisms of transpacific studies, which tends to gloss over the Pacific Ocean and Islands in the transit between North America and Asia. In response, Suzuki employs an oceanic and relational perspective in her reading of Pacific Islander and Asian American literatures through Pacific Indigenous methodologies and frameworks.

The concept of passage is the main structuring metaphor of the book. Each chapter covers a different passage undertaken in the transpacific, moving through the Pacific Ocean to ensure the presence of the islands and people in the Pacific. For Suzuki, tracing these passages necessitates taking the histories and engagements of Pacific Islanders seriously, especially in relation to the Asian diaspora. Passage also refers to literary passages, which portray the ruptures and relations in transpacific movements and provide spaces to creatively and critically present decolonial engagements and practices.

The first three passages of the book—“Militarized Passages,” “Refugee Passages,” and “Commercial Passages”—navigate through the main discourses that determine the traversals upon the Pacific Ocean. Colonial and neoliberal pursuits in the ocean have been justified and enacted through discourses of securitization, domestication, and labor, respectively, to control the Pacific space and the people within it. This generates racialized divisions among Indigenous Pacific Islanders, Asian settlers, and refugees. However, Suzuki shows how Asian American and Pacific Islander writers use literature as a passage to disclose and decolonize by way of oceanic fluidity, shared vulnerability, and interrelation.

From passages that span the oceanic space, “Embodied Passages” converge in the specificity of Hawai‘i, where Suzuki's background as a Japanese American woman who grew up in Hawai‘i informs her analysis of the complex racialized dynamics in the islands. She recognizes how the minority histories and struggles of Asian settlers have led to their complicity in the colonizing endeavors of the US settler state. Yet she contends that although the settler state has dismembered the bodies of both Asian settler and Indigenous Kanaka Moali in different ways, an alliance between them is possible by turning to a transoceanic genealogical epistemology that can revisit and reconnect these dismembered parts.

The book ends with “Virtual Passages,” which stresses how imperial and settler time has sought to determine and justify the transnational capital and neoliberal temporalities of the transpacific. By reifying progress, civilizational modernity is imposed and disconnects modern time from traditional (Indigenous) time, functioning as a temporal shackle for the continued colonization of the Pacific. Technology has also been used to control and generate fear of the Asian figure to further establish racialized differentiation and conflict. But technology also serves as a virtual passage that can reinstate and revise how time flows in the Pacific. Digital media, for instance, becomes a connective tissue among diasporic Asian and Pacific Islanders, and can be used to create multimodal literature that manifest alternative temporalities. In this final passage, the Pacific attains a materiality and virtuality that, like the ocean, follows its own logics, currents, and rhythms to determine its own future.

Through her skillful handling of these passages, Suzuki provides routes that gives due value to both Indigenous Pacific and Asian diasporic perspectives. She does not seek to resolve their disjuncture but to revitalize their engagement. Her rigorous and grounded navigation of these literatures is an important exercise in expanding the critical purchase of the field and “transpacific,” ensuring its contemporary relevance. However, her research and analysis remain premised upon the hegemonic frame of US-centered discourse. Though she does turn to Indigenous frameworks, her study is launched and often remains within the boundaries of US circuits in publishing and scholarship. In US discourses, the Asian figure is presented as always-already diasporic, and her focus on the Asian American is clear. But “Asian” is just as complex as “Pacific Islander,” and her discussion of the transpacific could have been even more developed had she also considered the works of writers and scholars who dwell in Asia. For instance, US imperialism overlaps with histories of Asian imperialisms, which could provide a broader understanding of the socioeconomic and political circuits that work in the Pacific. Moreover, indigenous discourses in Asia also take on their own nuanced forms, and these could offer greater transindigenous conceptual and activist networks.

Nevertheless, as J. Kēhaulani Kauanui writes in a blurb on the book's back cover, “Finally, a book that takes the ‘and’ in Asian American and Pacific Islander seriously.” Ocean Passages is an important offering at the intersection of Asian American, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, diasporic, and transpacific studies. While Suzuki does not shy away from calling attention to the complicity of all parties in circuits of settler colonialism, she also emphasizes alternative routes through which both Asian American and Pacific Islander studies can take in the pursuit of decolonization. She writes that the openness of the ocean threatens transnational capitalism (p. 189), and in the same way, these ocean passages resist and reconfigure settler colonial temporal and territorial control.