Review of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific by Jeffrey Santa Ana et al.

Focusing on Indigenous Pacific Islander, Asian diasporic, and Asian North American cultural expressions as they parse the connections linking historical and contemporary imperialisms to transpacific environmental devastation and ecological ruins, the editors and contributors behind the critical anthology Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific make a bold intervention in a complex and fraught field. The “transpacific” has been variously defined and contested in recent years, with many scholars pointing out the frequent elision of Indigenous Pacific Islander contexts and scholarship. Empire and Environment provides a bracing corrective to these omissions. Further, it takes a timely and far-ranging postcolonial, ecocritical approach to the longue durée of ecological ruin in an immense, complex, and fluidly defined geographical region.

While the anthology is far from comprehensive and, indeed, has no ambition to be, it provides a strong thematic foundation for the main issues in the field. Divided into four parts, the volume begins with a thorough introduction by the editors that lays out the multiple critical intersections that their collection brings together. They set up a convincing argument for reading transpacific studies as an interdisciplinary confluence of imperialism and climate change, decolonial perspectives on the Anthropocene, relations with the American continents, and racial capitalism and the environment. Each section begins with a poem by Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez about his home, the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), and more generally about ecological ruination broadly writ. This ruptures the academic writing of the volume with an interpellation of an Indigenous Pacific Islander epistemology in the form of incantations, elegies, exhortations, and meditations on loss, grief, and resurgence.

The first section of the collection, “(Framing) Postcolonial Ecocritical Approaches to the Asia-Pacific,” features an eclectic range of scholarship. Jeffrey Santa Ana, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, Chitra Sankaran, and John Charles Ryan offer myriad methodologies and praxes to tackle this issue of approaches. Santa Ana aligns the region with the field of “queer ecologies” through an analysis of Han Ong’s novel The Disinherited (35); Gutierrez offers a fascinating historical and aesthetic analysis of the decontextualizing nature of “white space” in Euro-American botanical illustrations in the Philippines (64); Sankaran analyzes South Indian goddess films for the ways they conceive alternative forms of eco-feminism; and Ryan provides an invigorating examination of Indigenous Papua New Guinean poetry as a “performative-restorative nexus” for imagining ecological futures beyond imperial “rot” (108).

The second section, “Militarized Environments,” delves into the painful and violent histories of military occupation and environmental degradation in the transpacific with poignant meditations on the afterlives of empire and environmental violence in Vietnam and Micronesia. Emily Cheng provides a highly original ecocritical reading of lê thi diem thúy’s seminal refugee novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Heidi Amin-Hong sees contemporary artistic and literary depictions of “the ruination of Vietnamese waterscapes” as illustrating the “longer colonial history of US militarism and East Asian sub-imperialism in Southeast Asia” (129). In a similar vein, Zhou Xiaojing, in her chapter on Micronesian ecopoetry, considers how the works of Perez and Marshall Island poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner are both works of resistance and transcorporeal, living archives of the ongoing ecological degradation of Micronesia’s islands.

Section three, “Decolonizing the Transpacific,” takes on the thorny issue of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. Rebecca H. Hogue examines cultural texts and social movements in Hawai‘i that have not only brought the colonial militarization of the archipelago into the public awareness, but also focalize “the re-insistence of Indigenous epistemologies in the public sphere” (190). In her comparative study, Rina Garcia-Chua develops a theory of “disentrancing” to show how Filipino postcolonial subjects and Canadian white settler subjects must stop ignoring the ways in which Indigenous peoples have borne the larger burden of imperialism’s ecological and social consequences. Ti-Han Chang rounds out the section with an important analysis of Indigenous and other texts about social outcasts in Taiwan to argue that the country’s “economic success . . . cannot be dissociated from the environmental price paid by . . .  people on the periphery” (215).

The final section, “Climate Justice and Ecological Futurities,” takes on a speculative mode, considering what might come to pass in our transpacific futures. Amy Lee reads Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea as a transpacific novel that characterizes human agents as “different types of forces that move through, act upon, and adapt to the world” instead of subjects that only thrive on “extraction and exploitation” (241). More compelling, however, are the chapters by Emalani Case and Chad Shomura, which take divergent stances on the conservation and preservation of lands and waters. Case discusses the Thirty Meter Telescope, controversially proposed for development on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea, to show that the traditional concept of aloha, “a kind of love that cannot be put on a page” (254), has been central to Hawai‘ian self-determination. More provocatively, Shomura suggests that plastic debris in the Pacific needs to be re-envisioned for this imperial waste to be “creatively incorporated into new forms of collaborative endurance” to help us “deposit care into archives of the future that are presently in the making” (273).

One minor criticism that might be leveled at some of the chapters is their authors’ heavy reliance on anthropologist Anne Laura Stoler’s scholarship on imperial formations and debris. Without diminishing how vital Stoler’s work is to understanding the ongoing imperial realities of ecological devastation, it may have behooved the authors to more intently consider how Stoler’s work might not be sufficient as a theoretical basis for such a multi-faceted space as the transpacific.

The chapters by Ryan, Sankaran, Shomura, and Hogue gesture towards decolonial and postcolonial ways of understanding the transpacific and its ecologies. Nevertheless, Empire and Environment’s greatest legacy for the emergent field of transpacific ecocriticism is its emphasis on the possibilities of art and other creative modes as powerful ways of understanding the resurgence and resistance of the peoples of the transpacific.