Postscript: On Transpacific Futurities

In 2001, just weeks before 9/11, a poorly equipped fishing boat, attempting to make the treacherous crossing from Indonesia to Australia, sank with its 433 passengers. A passing Norwegian container ship rescued the mostly Afghan refugees and, overburdened with sick and injured people, headed to the closest Australian port at tiny Christmas Island. The Australian government led by then–Prime Minister John Howard refused to allow them to enter the port and, in an unprecedented military response, sent the navy to intercept. Borrowing from the 1990s U.S. refugee detention playbook on Guantánamo Bay, a hasty deal was made by the Howard government with the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, where the unlucky refugees were taken and detained. Subsequent refugees arriving by boat were taken to another detention camp set up on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Although both centers were closed for several years after much criticism, they reopened in 2012 and continue to incarcerate hundreds of men, women, and children for unlimited periods, despite ongoing censure from human rights groups and a recent Papua New Guinean High Court ruling that has deemed the detention camps illegal.¹ This arrangement has generally been known as the “Pacific solution.”²

The Pacific, indeed, has long been a place full of solutions. Invoking the work of earlier Pacific Rim and Asian-Pacific scholars, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen note that “in the European, American and Asian imaginations, the idea of the Pacific is inseparable from fantasies of economic expansion and domination.”³ With its long history of competing empires and multiple colonizations, the Pacific is today the site of ever more intense resource, goods, and capital flows; diaspora, immigrant, and refugee crossings; neoliberal nationalist strategies and security alignments. A perfect image of the desire for its total management is well articulated by the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, as Suzuki points out in her fine essay for this issue, aspires to a U.S.-led “vision of peaceful neoliberal futurity.” The regional partnerships that aligned to produce the Pacific Solution’s refugee detention regime can rightly be called its nightmarish flip side in that they are equally made in the name of security and futurity. The governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, still struggling with the aftermath of decades of Australian and European colonial resource extraction, initially agreed to take the refugees in bilateral agreements that would wipe millions of dollars from their countries’ debt burden while guaranteeing future development aid from their large, wealthy neighbor. That such arrangements have been described as “conditional aid” or the “securitization of aid”⁴ evokes the ways in which transpacific pasts and futures repeatedly condition, secure, entangle, and entail each other in order to shape “solutions” for our precarious present.

Thinking through and with the provocative essays in this collection, I take the critical import of “transpacific futurities” as articulated by Bahng and Mok as precisely the opportunity and imperative to interrogate the institutional, political, and historical assumptions of Asian and Asia-Pacific futurity. How might we theorize, for instance, the role of small Pacific islands as simultaneous holding cells for humanity’s surplus, the site of transnational capital and aid transfers, and the front line in the planet’s battle with climate change and ecological disaster? If, as Bahng has astutely pointed out, “the early twenty-first century is laden with speculation, mostly of two kinds: one that anticipates the economic potential of the ‘Asian century,’ and another that projects its ecological devastation,”⁵ the interrogation of transpacific futurity is both necessary and timely for conjugating the multiple crises of our political present. To quote from Bahng and Mok’s introduction to this issue, such an interrogation requires we examine “how the transpacific and futurity dwell on each other.”

The essays assembled here compose a significant scholarly intervention less because of any straightforwardly “Pacific” or “futuristic” content than their attentiveness to the material, ideational, racial, and technological productions of transpacific space and time—of its diasporas, immobilities, military and trade alliances, ecological networks, as well as the nostalgic pasts and leveraged futures that subtend them. Thus...