Oceanic possibilities for Communication Studies

ABSTRACT

Communication scholars have examined how colonialism is rhetorically maintained, and how discourse excludes Indigenous perspectives. Yet, seldom has the field addressed rhetorical phenomena from Oceanic places experiencing colonization and militarization. This essay calls for prioritizing orientations from the Pacific—an expansive site from which to understand structures and cultures of contemporary colonial power. This Oceanic orientation navigates Oceanic rhetoric, which insists upon the centrality of Indigenous subjects to the ocean and communication phenomena that belong to these places. Applying field methods in the Mariana Islands, I triangulate indigeneity, colonization, and rhetorical phenomena as they operate simultaneously outside and inside an “American” imperial center.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• colonialism
• militarism
• rhetoric
• Oceania

ORCID

Tiara R. Na’puti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7984-8308

Notes

1 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division United Nations, “World Population Prospects The 2017 Revision, Volume 1: Comprehensive Tables” (New York, 2017), https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2017_Volume-I_Comprehensive-Tables.pdf.

2 Dale Husband, “Teresia Teaiwa: You Can’t Paint the Pacific with Just One Brush Stroke,” E-Tangata (blog), October 25, 2015, https://e-tangata.co.nz/korero/you-cant-paint-the-pacific-with-just-one-brush-stroke/.

3 See: Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 391–410; Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” Contemporary Pacific; Honolulu 13, no. 2 (2001): 315–42.

4 Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies,” 318–22.

5 Ibid., 316–18, 324, 328; Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

6 Vicente M. Diaz, “‘To “P” or Not to “P”?’: Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 7, no. 3 (2004): 183–208.

7 Teresia Teaiwa, “The Articulated limb: Theorizing Indigenous Pacific Participation in the Military Industrial Complex,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 1, no. 1 (2017): 1–20; Keith Camacho, “After 9/11: Militarized Borders and Social Movements in the Mariana Islands,” American Quarterly 64, no. 4 (2012): 685–713; Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, xv–xlviii; Vicente M. Diaz, “Tackling Pacific Hegemonic Formations on the American Gridiron,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 3 (2011): 90–113.

8 Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59; Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (2012): 647–57; Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Introduction,” in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2.

9 Rona Tamiko Halualani, In The Name Of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Rona Tamiko Halualani, “‘Where Exactly is the Pacific?’: Global Migrations, Diasporic Movements, and Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communicaiton 1, no. 1 (2008): 3–22; Steve Elers and Rosser Johnson, “Māori Perspectives of Public Information Advertising Campaigns,” Intercultural Communication Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 31–49; David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, “Going Native: South Park Satire, Settler Colonialism, and Hawaiian Indigeneity,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 60–6. Francis S. Dalisay, “The Spiral of Silence and Conflict Avoidance: Examining Antecedents of Opinion Expression Concerning the U.S. Military Buildup in the Pacific Island of Guam,” Communication Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2012): 481–503; Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019):4–25.

10 Tiara R. Na’puti. “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies Against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 495–501.

11 Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions,” 48–55; Wanzer, “Delinking,” 647–57; Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Critical Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2016): 3–13; Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 1–26; Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Settler Xicana: Postcolonial and Decolonial Reflections on Incommensurability,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 3 (2017): 525–36; Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer, “Pacific Moves Beyond Colonialism: A Conversation from Hawai’i and Guåhan,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 3 (2017): 537–47.

12 Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPré, ed., Communicating Colonialism: Readings on Postcolonial Theory(s) and Communication (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2013); Rowe, “Settler Xicana,” 527–8; Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–309; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76.

13 Na’puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity,” 499–500.

14 Na’puti and Rohrer, “Pacific Moves,” 537.

15 Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, xxvii.

16 Karma R. Chávez, “Border Interventions The Need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of Militarization,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 48–64.

17 For example, communication scholars examine militarism in circumscribed ways from discourses of national security, war, peace, and empire (Achter 2016; Ivie 2013, 2016; Taylor and Hartnett 2000), to the rhetorical production of militarism in sports (Butterworth 2012, 2014; Fischer 2014; Kurtz 2014), in commemoration and memorials (Biesecker 2002; Inuzuka & Fuchs, 2014; Inuzuka 2013), and in the global war on terror (Cloud 2004; Hickerson, Moy, and Dunsmore 2011; Hayes 2016; Holland 2009).

18 Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, 309–20; Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson, and Makoto Arakaki, Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Cynthia Enloe, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

19 Catherine Lutz, “Bureaucratic Weaponry and the Production of Ignorance in Military Operations on Guam,” Current Anthropology 60, no. 19 (2019): S108–21; David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015).

20 Teresia Teaiwa, “Black and Blue in the Pacific: Afro-Diasporic Women Artists on History and Blackness,” Amerasia Journal 43, no. 1 (2017): 145.

21 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986); Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: US imperialism and Black slavery in the South Seas after the civil war (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

22 Teaiwa, “Black and Blue,” 145; See also: Maile Arvin, “Possessions of Whiteness: Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness in the Pacific,” Decolonization Indigeneity, Education & Society blog, June 2, 2014, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/possessions-of-whiteness-settler-colonialism-and-anti-blackness-in-the-pacific/

23 Armond R. Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 349–58; Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 319–25.

24 Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies,” 315.

25 Na'puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric,” 1–22.; Halualani, “Where Exactly,” 6, 12–15.

26 Davis, The Empires’ Edge, 8.

27 Teresia Teaiwa, quoted in Epeli Hau’ofa, We are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 41.

28 Teaiwa, “Black and Blue,” 145.

29 Ojeya Cruz Banks, “Tånó: A Black Chamoru Dancing Self-Revelation,” Amerasia Journal 43, no. 1 (2017): 147.

30 Craig Santos Perez, “Guam and Archipelagic American Studies,” in Archipelagic American Studies and the Caribbean, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 98.

31 Interviewee 4, interviews by Tiara R. Na’puti, Hagåtña, Guåhan, July 2011.

32 Interviewee 20, interviews by Tiara R. Na’puti, Hagåtña, Guåhan, July 2011 & 2019.

33 Teresia Teaiwa, “Native Thoughts: A Pacific Studies Take on Cultural Studies and Diaspora,” in Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations, ed. Charles D. Thompson Jr and Graham Harvey (Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2005), 15–35.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a WFI Research Grant from Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society, Villanova University [grant number 18190053].