Episodios
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The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean.
While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2024) argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks, racing ahead of the American state. Yet when profits were threatened, they clamored for the US government to follow them into the Pacific.
Through novel, intriguing stories of American small businessmen, this book shows how American entrepreneurs manipulated the United States into pursuing imperial projects in the Pacific. It explores their travels abroad and highlights the consequences of contemporary struggles for justice in the Pacific.
Our guests today are: Miles M. Evers, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut; and Eric Grynaviski, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it?
This title is also available as Open Access here.
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The Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years, its sheer scale proved an obstacle to early European imperial powers. Enter Lope Martin, a forgotten Afro-Portuguese ship pilot heretofore unheralded by historians.
In Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (Mariner Books, 2021), UC-Davis history professor and Bancroft Prize winner Andrés Reséndez tells the story of Martin and the broader history of trans-Pacific travel in the 16th century. Part environmental history, part imperial expeditionary tale, and part swashbuckling adventure, Reséndez recounts thousands of years of Pacific history, tracking the long story of connection between the western coast of the Americas and the eastern coast of Asia. In doing so, he reveals just how dynamic and metropolitan early imperial Spanish maritime culture was, and broadens our horizons beyond the usual stories of well known explorers such as Columbus and Magellan. By unearthing the long-ignored story of Martin, Conquering the Pacific reveals a rich history of excitement, danger, and of human resilience under remarkable circumstances.
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The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year.
From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen's luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents' disparate lives--her father's consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother's relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock--for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation.
A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia--and questions her own ability to become a mother--one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna's love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave.
When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific "paradise," where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits (Knopf, 2024) is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.
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Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?
As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. During the occupation, American servicemen married approximately 1,800 women from New Zealand and the island Pacific, creating legal bonds through marriage and through children. Additionally, American servicemen fathered an estimated four thousand nonmarital children with Indigenous women in the South Pacific Command Area.
In Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) Dr. Angela Wanhalla details the intimate relationships forged during wartime between women and U.S. servicemen stationed in the South Pacific, traces the fate of wartime marriages, and addresses consequences for the women and children left behind. Paying particular attention to the experiences of women in New Zealand and in the island Pacific—including Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and the Cook Islands—Of Love and War aims to illuminate the impact of global war on these women, their families, and Pacific societies. Dr. Wanhalla argues that Pacific war brides are an important though largely neglected cohort whose experiences of U.S. military occupation expand our understanding of global war. By examining the effects of American law on the marital opportunities of couples, their ability to reunite in the immediate postwar years, and the citizenship status of any children born of wartime relationships, Dr. Wanhalla makes a significant contribution to a flourishing scholarship concerned with the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and militarization in the World War II era.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions.
Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function.
Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].
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Is Kiribati in the American lake, Indo-Pacific or Chinese Pacific? In this Episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki to conceptualize Kiribati as an interstitial island in the Chinese Pacific.
Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. In 2023, he published an article in Political Geography that critically analyzes the case of a 2020 Chinese diplomatic visit in Kiribati. The event became known on August 16th, 2020, when Michael Field, a journalist writing with a focus on the South Pacific, posted a visually shocking photograph on Twitter. He typed the following words as a commentary to the exceptional circumstances that the picture depicted: “KIRIBATI - Event in which Chinese Ambassador Tang Songgen walked on backs of children as part of a welcome took place Friday/Saturday at Marakei, 80 km northeast of Tarawa, Kiribati”. Rodolfo Maggio uses his anthropological lens to clarify that the way the welcome ceremony for the Chinese diplomat has been enacted suggests that the “I-Kiribati political project” is far from being a passive acceptance of Chinese presence and influence in the Pacific Ocean.
Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EU twinning project “The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region”, leading the preparatory research and providing supervision and counselling to junior researchers.
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In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.
Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student.
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In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Seven generations later, the island is still inhabited by descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways.
In 2018, Brandon Presser went to live among its families; two clans bound by circumstance and secrets. There, he pieced together Pitcairn's full story: an operatic saga that holds all visitors in its mortal clutch – even the author.
Told through vivid historical and personal narrative, The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific (Icon Books, 2022) goes beyond the infamous mutiny on the Bounty, offering an unprecedented glimpse at life on the fringes of civilization, and how, perhaps, it's not so different from our own.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration.
This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University.
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Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the Pacific: The Great Ocean (Robinson, 2023) succeeds in examining both the indigenous presence on ocean's islands and Western control or influence over the its islands and shores. There is a particular focus on the period from the 1530s to 1890 with its greater Western coastal and oceanic presence in the Pacific, beginning with the Spanish takeover of the coasts of modern Central America, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and continuing with the Spaniards in the Philippines.
There is also an emphasis on the very different physical and human environments of the four quadrants of the Pacific - the north-east, the north-west, the south-east and the south-west - and of the 'coastal' islands, that is the Aleutians, Japan and New Zealand, and continental coastlines. The focus is always on the interactions of Japan, California, Peru, Australia and other territories with the ocean, notably in terms of trade, migration and fishing.
Black looks first at the geology, currents, winds and physical make-up of the Pacific, then the region's indigenous inhabitants to 1520. He describes the Pacific before the arrival of Europeans, its history of settlement, navigation methods and religious practices.
From Easter Island, the focus shifts to European voyages, from Magellan to Cook and Tasman, the problems they faced, not least the sheer scale of the ocean. Black looks at the impact of these voyages on local people, including the Russians in the Aleutian Islands.
Outside control of the region grew from 1788 to 1898. The British laid claim to Australia and America to the Phillipines. Western economic and political impact manifested in sandalwood and gold rushes, and the coming of steamships accelerated this impact.
Territorial claims spread through Willis, Perry and the Americans, including to Hawaii. Black looks at the Maori wars in New Zealand and the War of the Pacific on the South American coast. Christian missionary activity increased, and Gaugin offered a different vision of the Pacific.
1899 to 1945 marked the struggle of empires: the rise of Japan as an oceanic power, and the Second World War in the Pacific as a critical moment in world history.
Oil-powered ships ushered in the American Age, from 1945 to 2015, bringing the end of the British Pacific. France had a continued role, in Tahiti and New Caledonia, but America had become the dominant presence. Black explores the political, economic and cultural impacts of, for example, Polynesians attending universities in America and Australasia; the spread of rugby; and relatively little international tension, although some domestic pressures remained, including instability in Papua New Guinea and Fiji.
The book ends with a look at the Pacific's future: pressures from industrial fishing, pollution and climate change; the rise of drug smuggling; greater Chinese influence leading to conflict with America and Australasia - the Pacific is once again on the frontline of military planning. But the Pacific's future also includes tourism, from Acapulco to Hawaii, and from Tahiti to Cairns.
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Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand.
Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand's urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight.
Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2023) explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.
About the Author:
An archivist by day and an author by night, Jared Davidson is an award-winning writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. His books include the acclaimed Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 (Otago University Press, 2019), Sewing Freedom (AK Press, 2013), The History of a Riot (BWB Texts, 2021) and the co-authored He Whakaputanga: The Declaration of Independence (Bridget Williams Books, 2017). Through history from below, Jared explores the lives of people often overlooked by traditional histories – from working-class radicals of the early twentieth century to convicts of the nineteenth. He is currently the Research Librarian Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Ed Amon has a Master of Indigenous Studies and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at [email protected]
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Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.
Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
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How does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity?
L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural environment of the Pacific. The book argues that Stevenson was religiously literate within a Scottish Presbyterian tradition and therefore well placed to grasp with subtlety the breadth and dynamics of a Christianized Pacific culture. It considers his legacy with respect to issues of indigenous sovereignty and agency and positions him within an important and wide-ranging modern debate about inculturation, defined as the emergence of Christianity from within a particular culture rather than imposed on it from outside. Through this study of a major Scottish writer, the book offers a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.
L. Michael Ratnapalan is Associate Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He has published widely on modern intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on Britain’s interactions with the wider world.
Joseph Gaines can be reached at [email protected]
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Malaita is one of the major islands in the Solomons Archipelago and has the largest population in the Solomon Islands nation. Its people have an undeserved reputation for conservatism and aggression. Clive Moore's book Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s (Australia National UP, 2017) argues that in essence Malaitans are no different from other Solomon Islanders, and that their dominance, both in numbers and their place in the modern nation, can be explained through their recent history.
A grounding theme of the book is its argument that, far than being conservative, Malaitan religions and cultures have always been adaptable and have proved remarkably flexible in accommodating change. This has been the secret of Malaitan success.
Malaitans rocked the foundations of the British protectorate during the protonationalist Maasina Rule movement in the 1940s and the early 1950s, have heavily engaged in internal migration, particularly to urban areas, and were central to the ‘Tension Years’ between 1998 and 2003. Making Mala reassesses Malaita’s history, demolishes undeserved tropes and uses historical and cultural analyses to explain Malaitans’ place in the Solomon Islands nation today.
This book is available open access here.
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Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates the social life of Black Power politics across the African diaspora from the 1950s through the 1980s. Told through Bermudian activist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego’s life, Swan takes readers on a journey through Black radical diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, western, eastern, and southern Africa, and Oceania. A global history of Pan-African organizing, Swan examines various dimensions of Black radicalism, and importantly demonstrates the centrality of environmental activism to Black Power and anticolonial politics. As Swan reconstructs this complex web of global Black radicalism, he also uncovers the ways that Black activists and organizations pivoted in response to international networks of Western surveillance and subterfuge. Readers come to appreciate how Black radicalism shaped anticolonial independence struggles in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, for instance, while evaluating how those struggles in turn, reformulated global Black Power. Scholars seeking to understand the enduring and far-reaching entailments of Black radical politics should study this path-breaking book on Black internationalism.
Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall
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An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023) is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, cultural, historical, and theoretical connections and ecologies to introduce students to the history and theory of water-centric thinking. Comprised of multinational texts and materials, each chapter will provide readers with a range of primary and secondary sources, offering a fresh look at the major oceanic regions, salt and freshwater geographies, and the physical properties of water that characterize the Blue Humanities. Each chapter engages with carefully-chosen primary texts, including frequently-taught works such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Homer's The Odyssey, and Luis Vaz de Camões' The Lusiads, to provide the perfect pedagogy for students to develop an understanding of the Blue Humanities chapter by chapter.
Readers will gain insight into new trends in intellectual culture and the long histories of humans thinking with water, ranging across the many coastlines of the World Ocean to Pacific clouds, Mediterranean lakes, Caribbean swamps, Arctic glaciers, Southern Ocean rainstorms, Atlantic groundwater, and Indian Ocean rivers. Providing new avenues for future thinking and investigation of the Blue Humanities, this volume will be ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses engaging with the environmental humanities and oceanic literature.
Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. His academic expertise includes environmental criticism, the blue humanities, Shakespeare studies, early modern European poetry, and critical theory. He has published five single-author books, including Ocean (2020), Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), and Shipwreck Modernity (2015). He has edited or co-edited six other volumes, published many chapters and articles in scholarly journals and collections, and organized exhibitions and symposia on blue humanities topics. His research has been funded by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Maritime Museum in London, and other institutions. He received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000.
Scott T. Erich is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation, "Taming the Sea: Property, Rights, and the Extractive Seascape of Southeastern Arabia," is an ethnographic and historical examination of how fishermen, local rulers, colonial officials, and private companies claim rights to oceanic “territory” and extract marine natural resources – including pearls, fish, sponges, and oil – from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. He is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Previously, Scott was a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., and a Fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs in Muscat, Oman. He has worked at the University of Chicago, the Middle East Institute, and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Baruch College, and a Community Reef Ambassador with the Billion Oyster Project.
Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.
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Similar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku.
Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he is also the Chair of Taiwan studies. Truly Human is the result of nearly two decades of field research and interactions among the Sediq and Truku; the book provides a deep yet accessible dive into matters such as hunting practices, belief systems, electoral politics, historical narratives, and how Taiwan's geopolitical status may affect the island's indigenous communities.
As Taiwan becomes ever-more-prominent in international headlines, Truly Human helps readers draw parallels with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, and learn about a dimension of Taiwanese and Austronesian society that often gets lost in discussions centered on conflict.
Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage.
This book is available open access here.
Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming.
Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific.
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