Ecological Aftermaths in the Black Pacific: The Racial Logics of Settler Security and Writing Toward Futurity in the Poetry of Teresia Teaiwa and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

Abstract

Abstract:This essay examines the racial logics of antiblackness and Indigenous dispossession that subtend U.S. policies and discourses of development of Micronesia throughout the Cold War. These racial logics attribute the manufactured dependence in Micronesia to racial and biological primitivism and mask the true roots of social ills as the displacements and environmental destruction produced by U.S. and European settler colonialisms, militarisms, and developmental policies. I suggest that an engagement of Asian American and Black Pacific studies offers a starting point for disentangling the racial logics of settler security and its environmental impact. Through close readings of poems from Teresia Teaiwa's Searching for Nei Nim'anoa and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter, I argue that both Micronesian writers turn to poetry to counter the racial logics of dominant discourses. They show instead the ecological aftermaths of Indigenous dispossession and antiblackness and the consequences that bear out in deferred sovereignty and increased vulnerability to climate change. More than reactive, however, Teaiwa and Jetñil-Kijiner also offer generative conceptions that affirm the vitality of Indigenous knowledges from which they articulate other possible futurities for the Pacific.