The Challenges of Island Studies

In the imagery of Western discovery and romance, Pacific islands are tropical paradises with long white beaches, palm trees and women ready to do whatever men (e.g. white men) ask of them. At the same time, those islands are also understood to be essential for the safety and security of faraway homelands. Guåhan/Guam is one island on which the contradictions of these two images continues to be played out in real time; the top two employers are tourism and the U.S. military. Taking a feminist perspective, this paper looks at security as both being and feeling safe. It will address the implications of the U.S. military presence, focusing on the meaning of feeling safe in a military colony of the United States. The paper reflects conversations and interviews with Chamoru and other residents conducted between 2010 and 2018, as well as student responses to questionnaires about being and feeling of safe. The purpose is not to portray a single, objective story but rather depict multiple voices and feelings, many of which often go unrecognized or are silenced. The paper suggests that the combination of colonization and militarization reinforces masculinities based on power, strength and the desire for protection through military means. It concludes that without decolonization and demilitarization, being ‘safe’ can only be possible in unsafe ways.

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.

For the past thirty years, the interdisciplinary field of Island Studies has been growing in the form of academic programs, research institutions or centres, communities of scholars and practitioners, and advocacy-based organizations at local, national and international scales. Although the term Island Studies has now become part of our lexicon, there has been less reflection on the institutional framework surrounding its emergence and evolution. This chapter describes and evaluates the institutional administrative structures associated with Island Studies to take stock of how and where this field of enquiry might be headed in the future. The main findings are that, despite considerable interest in Island Studies, it is still largely absent from most of our educational institutions. As was the case with Environmental Studies and Gender Studies, it may take an existential crisis for Island Studies to become a more established field. This crisis may be a combination of growing geopolitical tensions in ocean spaces, continued adverse impacts from climate change and sea level rise, and development challenges.

It has been critically discussed by many researchers to date that the characteristics attributed to island space such as “remoteness” and “isolation” have been defined and physically shaped by colonial discourses. To overcome such definition based on modern territorial concepts, island space needs to be viewed as “an emergent product of relations” (Massey 2005: 68) arising from diverse encounters (which may be consonant or dissonant). On the other hand, actions associated with the designation of cultural properties, which specify the cultural and historical values of the island landscape or items located in the area, lead to identification of the ideal state of the island through normative science. While such actions play a certain role in visualizing the value of the island, they also carry the risk of abandoning the multiplicity and plurality of value as well as oversimplifying the “relations”. Is it impossible for normatization and multiplicity/plurality of value to coexist within the same island space? This paper discusses the possibility and the ideal form of such coexistence from the perspective of cultural landscape, focusing on a case study of the experiences associated with cultural landscapes in the former Jinguashi Mines in Taiwan, the author’s research field.

The Ryukyu Archipelago consists of four island groups, namely the Amami Islands in Kagoshima Prefecture and the Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama Islands in Okinawa Prefecture. The languages that have been traditionally spoken in the Ryukyu archipelago are called the Ryukyuan languages. Based on previous research findings, it is widely known that Ryukyuan diverged from proto-Japanese-Ryukyuan. It is the only language proven to have genealogical relationship with Japanese.

For the past thirty years, the interdisciplinary field of island studies has been growing in the form of academic programs, research institutions or centers, communities of scholars and practitioners, and advocacy-based organizations at local, national, and international scales. Although the term island studies has now become part of our lexicon, there has been less reflection on the institutional framework surrounding its emergence and evolution. This chapter describes and evaluates the institutional administrative structures associated with island studies to take stock of how and where this field of enquiry might be headed in the future. The main findings are that despite considerable interest in island studies, it is still largely absent from most of our educational institutions. As was the case with environmental studies and gender studies, it may take an existential crisis for island studies to become a more established field. This crisis may be a combination of growing geopolitical tensions in ocean spaces, continued adverse impacts from climate change and sea level rise, and development challenges.