NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I remembering going out with someone, where just about everything I was attracted to about her, she was terrified and anxious about. It was a weird abrupt sort of relationship. One that I sometimes reflect back on and still feel puzzled about.  For example, I felt attracted to her because she liked to read. But after we began going out, I soon realized that for her, reading was something she did alone and didn't talk about it with others. None of her friends would read for fun and so she became incredibly anxious when I would want to talk to her about what she was reading and what I was reading.  She loved when I picked out books for her and gave them to her, thinking about what I felt she might enjoy reading, given the places she was at in her life. But she wouldn't talk to me about what she was reading and she would shut down if I tried to talk to her. For me, I love books and love reading, and I read things I never talk to anyone about and read things that I love to talk to

For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies dealt with sovereignty, most specifically Guam’s role in producing America’s sovereignty, or what role its invisibility or nothingness plays in producing America as sovereign. This may sound confusing, but what makes it difficult for most to wrap their heads around, is the simple fact of saying that something which has been for hundreds of years produced discursively as being “small” or “faraway” or “faint” or “owned by the US” as somehow creating something as great and grand and mighty as the United States of America. One frustrating aspect of writing my dissertation was the preparing of a literature review, which is a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless review of what others have written about your topic of choice and how you will either use and build on them or defy them. If you are familiar with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same thing nowadays, drawing mildly different c

When I talk about the United States, I often times end up having to qualify even the simple usage of the term because of Guam's political status. Guam is an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States. That means that it is both "a part of the United States" and also exists "apart from the United States." Its status, like those of other US colonies, has sometimes been referred to as "foreign in a domestic sense." Because of this status, when the United States as a nation, a country, a political entity is invoked in any forum, whether it be on the floors of Congress, the creation of a flag, the writing of a comedy bit or movie, Guam may or may not be included. Take for instance when the movie Pixels, directed by Chris Columbus and staring Adam Sandler was being created. The issue of Guam's inclusion and exclusion into the United States played a role in the fact that it was included as a location in the film. I wrote about th

 I'm excited this summer because I'll be a visiting scholar in Japan at Kobe University. I'll be teaching a course on transnational relations that focuses on militarization and militarism in the Asia-Pacific region. I'll be using two books for the course Militarized Currents edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho and The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Catherine Lutz has been a friend of Micronesia for a very long time and last came through Guam a few years ago. Here work is very important in terms of giving a structure to militarization and militarism and not just letting them be things taken for granted as natural parts of life, but being able to drawn them out of the background here and force them to become objects of analysis and critique. Her work when she came through Guam and gave several presentations and even testified in front of the Guam Legislature was very eye-opening to people about the nature of military bases and how they affect the c

Published on Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by Foreign Policy In Focus America after Hegemony by Cole Harrison   With the Iraq war fading into memory even as the country still simmers, the U.S. peace movement faces the need to reframe its message. We have spent the last 10 years resisting the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – tragedies that have not only devastated those two countries and taken tens of thousands of lives, but have left thousands of returning veterans with lifelong disabilities and taken a huge toll on our national economy. We’ve exposed nuclear weapons’ threat to human survival, organized against sanctions and war on Iran and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and built alliances with labor and community groups to cut the military budget. We’ve opposed lawless torture and drone killings, cyber-warfare attacks, and the U.S. “ pivot ,” which seeks to encircle China with military bases.

For me, the most depressing aspect of the past US presidential campaign was the final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. After months of trying to create stark contrasts between them, and trying to incite people to vote for them and not think of them as just being two slightly different flavors of the same soda, the façade fell fast and in an almost embarrassing fashion when the President and his challenger appeared to not only share the same talking points on foreign policy, but possibly share the same brain entirely. They looked more like long lost twins who had just found each other, rather than two distinct sides of the American ideological spectrum. This benefited Obama significantly, because Romney could not make the case that he offered something new in terms of how the US relates to the rest of the world. As a result the incumbency of Obama made him appear to be more solid, made it seem like the ideas they both supported belonged to him and