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Project summary
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By exploring historical cross-cultural Oceanic encounters in triangulation between Marshall Islander, Japanese, and American perspectives, my PhD research aims to understand how multiple layers of colonization and globalization have, like coral, sedimented and been embodied in the Marshall Islands. This project entails fieldwork, archival research, and documentary filmmaking interventions in Japan and the Island Pacific to explore the contradictory histories and narratives of 'home' that have converged in and around Kwajalein, the largest coral atoll on earth.
For Marshallese, the name Kwajalein derives from a mythical tree of abundance that provides for those who gather from all over the world to pick its many flowers. As such, it symbolizes a sort of intersection and focal point through which to understand meaning-making and memory for different groups of people—but also as an example of how different histories and identities compete and transform each other in their struggle to possess the same expanse of coral reef. I am thus also interested in what it means to 'deflower' Kwajalein and the consequences of this masculine-coded colonial pursuit. From wartime American code-naming of islands with male names to the hyper-phallicism of the intercontinental ballistic missile 'Star Wars' testing that takes place there, Kwajalein is also a stage upon which very different kinds of masculinities have been produced and reproduced. Part of my research thus also compares Marshallese matrilineality and narratives of male trickster heroism with the ‘macho’ American missions of liberation and patriotism; and the sorts of 'sonhood' and brotherhood exemplified by Japanese prewar soldiers and postwar tuna fishermen alike.
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