NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I wrote an entire dissertation about some of the blind spots and forms of hypervisibility that Guam is cloaked in. I based my theoretical framework on the idea that Guam is something that is largely invisible to the world, but also at the same time fairly secure in its identity as something military belonging to the United States. Guam is often regarded as a place that affords the United States strategic flexibility. I built off this to argue that the island's political status, it being a place that flickers in and out of existence on the one hand, but is rarely questioned as being something the US clearly has the right to militarize and control, gave the United States far more than just strategic possibilities, it gave them larger political abilities. Strategic labiality was a phrase I sometimes used, where the ambiguity of the island provides the US with far more than just a small island, a sliver of real estate in the Pacific. My dissertation was easy to write, because of the

 The website Common Dreams is a very good resource for those interested in a wide range of progressive topics. You'll find Democrat politics articles, which aren't very critical or radical. You'll find pieces that both support Israelis right to defend itself but also condemn it as a nation that is perpetuating genocide and colonialism. There is plenty of environmental coverage and economic justice news on everything from unions, to climate change, to resource wars. For me personally, as someone who comes from an island in the Pacific that is known as the tip of the spear and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, I truly appreciate the coverage that Common Dreams provides on militarism, in particular American militarism. Naturally, their lens for filtering through the possibilities of news focuses primarily on the hotspots where Americans troops are currently bombing, fighting and occupying and so it doesn't attend much to places where the bases have existed for a long

From the Harvard Crimson. A friend posted this on Facebook and couldn't not post it somewhere. It is a very good account of the type of internal trauma that someone can go through when the world around them, especially the structures of power that they are supposed to trust, casually dismiss them or tell them that nothing can be done. You end up taking on all the diffuse violence that passively sits in the world, uncaring and banal. It is from The Harvard Crimson: Dear Harvard: You Win By Anonymous 21 hours ago   Editors’ Note : This is a first-person, present-tense account of the aftermath of a sexual assault that took place in 2013. For reasons of both style and substance, we have left it in present tense. I’m writing this piece as I’m sitting in my own dining hall, only a few tables away from the guy who pressured me into sexual activity in his bedroom, one night last spring. My hands are trembling as they hover acro

When I was in graduate school I spent years collecting Guam mentions. I would hunt for them everywhere. In every database I could find. In every archive. In every index for every book. I would search through websites, through blogs, on Youtube videos. As I was writing my dissertation these Guam mentions represented a significant part of my "data." These were the things I wanted to analyze. These were the things I wanted to find some underlying structure for. It was difficult not in terms of articulating my thoughts, but articulating them in such a way that other people might care. When you are writing about "small" cultures or "small" islands, there is always the burden that your smallness puts on you. There is always a need to force you next to something larger so you can feel more relevant or more familiar. There is a need to put Chamorros next to another group, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Okinawans, any other group that might be more

I thought for sure that when I saw this article in my inbox this morning, that Guam would be on the list. In 2006 Foreign Policy magazine listed Guam as one of the six most important "foreign" bases of the more than 800 that it has around the world. Others included on that list were Camp Anaconda in Iraq, Bezmer Air base in Bulgaria, Manas Air Base in Kyrgistan, Guantanamo Bay, Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean, When I saw this article about the "Cost of Empire: Five expensive, controversial U.S. Military bases" I was sure that Guam, especially after all the extra attention it has gotten this year (Obama almost visiting, Guam almost getting capsized) would get a place on this list. But when I read through it and saw Guam missing, I wasn't quite sure why. Was this another case where Guam was now considered to be domestic and not foreign? Were these sites decided by region and so Kadena took the Asia-Pacific slot which Guam might have had? The author d

One of the best things about the 2010 Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs is that they take the Pacific very seriously. I attended so many academic conferences at the states and interacted with various antiwar and peace groups, but the Pacific was always something which you had to struggle to incorporate, or struggle to bring into the discussion. Even if it was an Asian American Pacific Islander event, the emphasis was always on Asians or Americans and the Pacific was always sort of brought in as a cute, exotic or ill-fitting footnote. When talking about these fragments from the Pacific, the equality or horizontal nature of the space would quickly be revealed in its dimension of vertical hierarchy, as the Pacific presence would be dealt with through recognition primarily, as something that needs to be seen, and brought into meaning or existence. The way that you can “recognize” this is if your value to the discussion is all cursory, as if what matters is that we have heard or

Our delegation arrived in Jeju late last night and there wasn't much to see in the middle of the night riding on a bus to the hotel. Today, we have a packed schedule of meeting with some of the villagers of Gangjeong, their mayor, a tour of different military facilities on Jeju Island, and finally a presentation this evening to the villager on our work and what is happening in other communities affecting by similar problems of militarization. For those who may not know much about Jeju or Gangjeong, I'm pasted an article below which puts the local struggle here on this island into a wider global strategic context very well. From the little I know so far about what the South Korean and US militarys have planned for this island and this tiny village, it is clear that every large grand plan depends upon small, local places. Often times the most valuable asset that these small, tiny place provide to those big grand plans, is that they are small, and outside of the vision of most pe