American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro, and: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris (review)

Gary Y. Okihiro's American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders and Martha Smith-Norris's Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War are two very different books. Whereas Okihiro's is a textbook for students of Asian American history, Smith-Norris's is a historical monograph geared toward U.S. foreign relations scholars. Where American History Unbound considers a broad range of Asian American and, to a lesser extent, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander experiences in U.S. history, Domination and Resistance is a case study that focuses on U.S. activities in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. While Okihiro's text explores Asian American historical positionality as laborers in a capitalist world-system dominated by Europe and the United States since the sixteenth century, Smith-Norris's focuses on Marshall Islanders as victims of U.S. militarism since the end of World War II.

That said, several threads tie the two books together, if loosely. First, both contest the theoretical underpinnings of the historical subfields in which they are situated by offering counter-histories that destabilize familiar narratives and approaches. Okihiro "unbinds" the field of U.S. history—which he contends has overlooked the active presence of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in the United States since before its founding—as well as the hegemonic discourses that have worked to define who counts as American. In its place, Okihiro offers a retelling of American history from "the fringes of [a] national consciousness" that has historically privileged whiteness as the nation's defining feature (Okihiro, p. 18). To do this, he disputes chronologies that overlook the presence of Asian and Pacific Islander migrant laborers in the United States since the mid-eighteenth century, and reveals how racism affected national legislation that defined U.S. citizenship according to race and national origin through the mid-twentieth century. Significantly, he also looks beyond the experiences of Chinese and Japanese Americans to include Koreans, Filipinos, South Asians, Native Hawaiians, and others to construct a history that strives to reflect Asian and Pacific Islander diversity in the United States.

Smith-Norris interrupts the field of U.S. foreign relations, which favors top-down realist reconstructions of U.S. global engagements during the Cold War, by focusing on a community often ignored by those narratives. She does this by offering an overview of the devastating consequences of U.S. nuclear and missile testing for several atoll communities in the Marshall Islands. These include Bikini and Enewetak, the test sites for sixty-seven¹ nuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958; Rongelap and Utrik, which were disastrously impacted by nuclear fallout; and Kwajalein, the test site for "hundreds of strategic and defensive missiles" over the past several decades (Smith-Norris, p. 6). Smith-Norris explores the removal of ri-Bikini² and ri-Enewetak from their home atolls; the delayed relocation of ri-Rongelap following the inundation of their atoll by nuclear fallout from the March 1, 1954, Castle Bravo test; the exploitation of these communities as test subjects in radiation experiments and their resulting health complications; and the ongoing displacement of ri-Bikini and ri-Rongelap, whose islands remain uninhabitable to this day. She also considers the social and environmental impacts of the U.S. missile-testing range on Kwajalein Atoll, including resettlement of Kwajalein's mid-corridor residents for intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) testing; resulting health and economic concerns for people living on overcrowded Ebeye island; the United States' limited compensation for the use of Kwajalein through the 1980s; and the unequal power relationship that influenced Marshall Islands independence and...