NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

When I teach modern World History, the island of Taiwan makes a couple of cameo appearances. It appears during the resolution of the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-Shek (CKS) flees to Formosa vowing to keep the fight alive from his new island fortress. In the way that I teach the class CKS is not a very sympathetic character. Coming from a Western perspective he is supposed to be the one that we choose as our champion, the one “our” side made deals with as being either the better or two evils or the lesser of two evils. CKS is no saint and is hardly worth much historical sympathy in my opinion and the conduct from the initial purge of communists, to his retreat to Taiwan to the white terror all attest to this. I don’t shy away from discussing the atrocities of the communists and Mao, but I don’t deny the historical significance and revolutionary nature of some of the communist reforms. As coming from a colony of the “west” I don’t like to take on their heroes

Published on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 by The Guardian/UK Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit? by Slavoj Žižek What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner? When a new provisional government was nominated in Tunis, it excluded Islamists and the more radical left. The reaction of smug liberals was: good, they are the basically same; two totalitarian extremes – but are things as simple as that? Is the true long

On Thursday night I was on a panel for a film screening at UOG. After the film we had a short discussion about the film and took some questions from the audience. The question I received from the audience was about how the people of Guam, Chamorros and non-Chamorros can speak out with one voice with regards to the buildup and thus take control of it. I thought about that questions for the moment, and couldn't really come up with a decent or hopeful answer. That surprised me, but I guess given how things have played out in terms of the US military buildup to Guam since 2005 I shouldn't be. I have been asked that same question in so many forms in these past five years, more frequently in the past year, but my answer has constantly changed, depending on how the island has changed or has not changed. Early on, I was fighting against the inevitability that people were infusing into the buildup despite not knowing anything about it. My answers were long and rambling, always hopeful

This Thursday I'll be giving my first ever colloquium. I've given speeches, spoken at conferences and symposiums and plenty of other types of public engagement, but in terms of having my very own forum or colloquium, taya' nai hu susedi este, ya pues didide' chathinasso yu'. The title of my talk is "The Gift of Imagination: Solidarity in the Asia-Pacific Region," and will be this Thursday, October 7, 3:30 - 5:00 pm at the UOG, CLASS Dean's Professional Development Room. The topic of my talk is based on my research/solidarity trips that I took over the summer to South Korea and Japan, representing Guam and informing others about its current struggles against US militarization, but also learning from farmers in Jeju, hibakusha in Nagasaki or Hiroshima and activists in Seoul. The paper, which I'm still refining slightly as I type this, is an interesting mixture of political activism and theoretical musing, moving between talking about how we might