Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments Our anthology began with a conversation at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Los Angeles in April 2005. At that time, Setsu was soliciting papers for an anthology conceived under the rubric of feminism and militarism, which she began in January 2005. Our conversation continued over the next year, and we realized that our research interests intersected in more ways than one. We exchanged significant publications in our fields and deliberated over the ways in which our fields produced and represented knowledge. Increasingly, we became interested in trying to articulate the possibilities for cross-regional research agendas that would further the work of demilitarization across our respective fields of study in American, Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander studies. In spring 2006, Keith came on board as coeditor, merging his academic training on U.S. colonialism and militarism in the Pacific Islands with Setsu’s research background on transnational liberation movements and feminist critical theory in Asia. The partnership turned out to be a productive one, where we learned from each other and became students of new fields of study. As a result, we have gained a deeper appreciation for the depth of knowledge there is to learn from the work of indigenous, feminist, and people-of-color scholars who are located in places that have been renamed throughout colonial modernity as the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Our present volume on gender, race, and colonialism in Asia and the Pacific Islands is a product of these intellectual and political convergences . We thank several organizations for allowing us to see this anthology through to its completion. The Asian American Studies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury all graciously xii · ACKNOWLEDGMENTS provided funds for the planning stages of our volume. We also appreciate the kind assistance of our graduate student researchers, Jolie Chea and Alfred Flores, who helped us to address various administrative and editorial tasks in a timely fashion. Teresa Algoso translated an early version of Naoki Sakai’s Japanese article that formed the basis of his essay. We appreciate Daisy Kim’s translation work and research assistance with the chapter by Insook Kwon. Our contributors likewise supported us throughout the entire process; their commitment, imagination, and scholarship have been an inspiration. As readers will observe, their contributions reflect the specific and shared intellectual goals of various projects in Asia and the Pacific. We hope they represent the kind of alliances and solidarities that foster critical insights and unanticipated political collaborations. Along these lines, two seminal articles are reprinted in this volume. We thank the University of California Press for allowing us to feature Katharine H. S. Moon’s article, “South Korean Movements against Militarized Sexual Labor,” which first appeared in Asian Survey. The University of Hawai‘i Press also granted permission to reproduce Teresia K. Teaiwa’s article, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” which first appeared in The Contemporary Pacific. More importantly, we thank Katharine and Teresia for agreeing to participate in our collective dialogue. That their articles are reproduced here—long after their initial circulation—testifies to the enduring relevance and value of radical feminist and indigenous thought and intervention in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Our efforts, moreover, have benefited greatly from the support of the University of Minnesota Press. We are grateful to all the members of its staff and review boards. Our external reviewers offered productive questions and suggestions for revision that substantially strengthened our introduction and the wider contents of the manuscript. We thank them, too. We especially acknowledge Richard Morrison, our senior editor at the University of Minnesota Press, for his support of the emergent, bridge-building intellectual work we aspire to generate. Adam Brunner also assisted in seeing the project through its various stages; working with him has been a pleasure. We appreciate the expertise of Sarah Breeding, our copyeditor, and Roberta Engleman, our indexer. We also gratefully acknowledge Daniel Ochsner’s cover design work. The photograph was taken by Keith Camacho, which is a picture taken from Banzai Cliff on Tinian in the Marianas. We also thank Vicente M. Diaz, Cynthia Enloe, Takashi Fujitani, David Hanlon, Jean J. Kim, Jodi Kim, Michelle Mason, Naoki Sakai, Laurel ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...