Pacific Science in Transnational and Translocal Perspective

Prevailing views cast the Pacific as a desolate, sparsely populated expanse between continents and a blank slate for the assertion of Western epistemological and territorial claims. Burgeoning East Asian scholarship, migration studies and indigenous critical works adumbrate a radically opposed view: of a knotted plurality of translocal and transcultural circuits of knowledge, colonization and competition linking peoples and environments across the Pacific and beyond. Imperial science historiography, meanwhile, has undergone a parallel shift from an application of monolithic national and cultural analytical frameworks toward an emphasis on the contingent translation of knowledges in circulation between peoples and localities. Our panel develops these themes with five case studies exemplifying diverse roles played by science in reifying and resisting situations of dominance in Pacific contexts: transglobal parasite research in the service of Hawaiian agriculture, influenza epidemiology as a catalyst for Hong Kong anticommunism, Fijian reef geology as an emblem of Northern Irish imperial identity, ethnoecology versus American imperial and Southeast Asian nationalist conceptions of indigenous knowledge, and marine biology as a site for the assertion of Nationalist Chinese policy vis à vis Japan. Collectively, we extend the reach of Pacific cultural and informational networks from East and Southeast Asia, through the South Pacific and continental United States, to contexts as far afield as Britain, Ireland and West Africa. We also conceptualize Pacific nations and empires as contested, imagined entities, subject to local political and environmental pressures, and implicated in far-flung trans-oceanic and transglobal concerns.