Island Studies and the US Militarism of the Pacific

Abstract

Scholarship in island studies has helped bring forward the relationship between land and sea, allowing us to examine how the oceans have been territorialized by the US military. I seek to place island studies in a conversation with scholars calling for a “critical ocean studies” for the 21st century who have fathomed the depths in relation to Indigenous and feminist epistemologies, particularly in the Pacific Islands. The paper turns to the 2018 RIMPAC exercises and places them in relationship to the work of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez.