The following dedication offers four letters from members of the Filipinx Hawai'i diaspora to Kumu Haunani-Kay Trask. Each of the authors recount the significance of her scholarship and activism in radically expanding Filipinx allyship work and the possibilities of decolonial futurities beyond the American settler state.
This roundtable, recorded in June 2025, highlights emerging scholarship on inter/nationalist solidarities with Palestine. It brings together emerging scholars in the fields of Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, and Pacific studies to document longer intellectual and activist genealogies of solidarity with and between Oceania, Asian/American, and the Palestinian diaspora. At the same time, this panel examines the larger inter/nationalist politics of settler institutions (i.e., the UN) and the collusions between North American and Israeli states to unpack the ongoing need to continue to articulate a transnational critique and analysis in the ongoing fight against genocide in Palestine.
In this special issue introduction, co-editors Katherine Achacoso, Josephine Faith Ong, Beenash Jafri, and Candace Fujikane consider the multiple place-based genealogies of Asian settler colonial critique, amplifying its transnational, place-based dimensions while also identifying new directions for study. Rather than laying claim to Asian settler colonialism as a field ripe for institutional reproduction, they name Asian settler colonial analytics as an assemblage of multiple approaches, methods and points of departure, signaling their investments in forging ethical relationships and connections with Indigenous peoples, communities, and struggles inside and outside the university.
As Indigenous resurgence and resistance globally make visible the violence of colonization, the growth of Asian diasporic solidarity introduces new possibilities and challenges. Literature examining Asian-Indigenous solidarities in settler colonial states primarily focuses on so-called North America. This conversation between organizers Nabilah Husna Abdul Rahman and Mengzhu Fu spirals from Aotearoa-based practices of decolonial solidarity outwards to Singapore, Canada-occupied Indigenous lands, and beyond. They explore place-based practices of solidarity, pedagogies, and their potential connections to international Indigenous communities. Offering practical strategies, from "small" to "big," they reaffirm the centrality of the protection of Indigenous land and waters in solidarity efforts.
This article considers the kinds of aesthetic practices Indigenous and diasporic subjects deploy to represent complex genealogies within Alejandro Yoshizawa's 2016 documentary All Our Father's Relations. I argue that the documentary juxtaposes diverse expressive forms in order to convey the contradictions and possibilities of Indigenous and Asian relationality, and decolonization and racial justice. The film dwells with the ambivalent affects emerging from mixed lineages through an aesthetics of visual and sonic juxtaposition, which I call "mixed epistemology." I examine how All Our Father's Relations employs a mixed epistemology to stage multiple itineraries of "return" and decolonial affiliation across different geographies.
This essay is a reflection on my ongoing book project, Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, which is a travelogue informed by Asian settler colonial critique. This project considers how histories of Japanese and American colonialisms shape the relationship that Filipinos have to this place, especially given how the U.S. bases have historically brought, and continue to bring, Filipinos to these islands. In this essay, I suggest that the genre of travel writing can be used in decolonial ways, to express forms of relationality that disrupt the tourist image of Okinawa as "Japan's Hawai'i
In recent years, diasporic hindu right has mobilized discourses of indigeneity to forge solidarities with Indigenous peoples across varying white settler colonial contexts of the U.S, Hawai'i, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These solidarities are not decolonial but are colonial and casted manifestations of hindu nationalism. Rooted in brahminical supremacy, these solidarities are not only fraudulent but also disavow the lives and struggles of Indigenous peoples globally. These solidarities demonstrate how the hindu right works in insidious ways in the disguise of multiculturalism and liberal anti-racism to co-opt and manipulate anti-colonial and decolonial agendas.
This forum indexes conversations among Asian American, Native American and religious studies scholars. Land and spirituality are central to Native American and Indigenous religions and Pacific Islander/Oceania/Pasifika studies but remain understudied in the subfield of Asian American religions. Trading views on affective attachments, sovereignty, and responsibility, we explore belonging as place-based; relationships among Indigenous, settler, and immigrant peoples; Indigenous and settler orientations to land; and Christianity and minoritized religions in the United States. We interrogate settler colonial hierarchies and objectifying land as property. We seek to build more substantial solidarities in support of Indigenous sovereignty and the decolonizing of Land.
This is a conversation between several co-founders of Filipinos for Gu & aring;han to discuss academic and community work on the specific articulations that Filpino colonial setter colonialism plays in Gu & aring;han/Guam. We consider the ways that Asian settler colonialism enables us to deconstruct dehumanizing social, political, epistemic, and linguistic hierarchies and instead build in and through inafa'maolek as a value and practice.
This article examines the history of racialized labor in pre-World War II primary resource industries along British Columbia's Fraser River. I argue that settler colonial policies and practices that restricted the activities of Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians - while often meant to divide them - were productive of dynamic relationships and solidarities. At the same time, I articulate a historiographical method for Asian settler colonial critique that brings together the wealth of records of Asian immigrant and Indigenous relationships.
This roundtable documents emerging conversations on Indigenous politics and settler colonialism in Asia. It brings together a diverse group of emerging diasporic/Indigenous scholars from the Cordilleras, Surigao, Okinawa, and the Champa Kingdom to examine contemporary issues in Indigenous politics in Asia and their implications for broader conversations on Asian/American Studies and Global Indigenous Studies. This roundtable asks: how might the place-based and regional specificity of Indigenous politics in Asia expand global conversations on Indigenous movements for self-determination and decolonization? How might settler colonialism in Asia inform more transnational and global theorizations of Asian settler colonialism?
This paper examines the legalization of dispossession in postwar Okinawa. Analysis focuses on Ordinance 109, an eminent domain law enacted by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands in 1953 to acquire the land needed for an expansive network of military bases much of which remains in place today. Archival research reveals Ordinance 109's hybrid legal foundation, which drew from both the U.S. Federal Declaration of Taking Act and the Japanese Law of Superficies (chij & omacr;ken) instituted in Okinawa by the Meiji Government upon the prefecture's incorporation into Japan. Using Patrick Wolfe's concept of "pre-accumulation" I demonstrate settler colonialism's reliance on legal momentums accumulated across time and space.
This essay contemplates my (re)settlement to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the form of a personal narrative, mapped out through four lessons in border-crossing, safety, orientation, and unlandedness. Each lesson reflects on the fraught complexities of "belonging" for Asian settlers as well as the liberatory potential of a relationship to place for Asian settlers that takes sacred connection, a love for community, and devotion to land as its lodestar.
The following brief introduction and text is published as a record of a speech given by the author in June 2024 at an off-campus commencement for the People's University for the Liberation of Palestine at UCLA. In it, she thanks the students of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment for their displays of love, determination, and commitment to community despite the repression and violence they faced from a mob attack and police agencies called in by their university administration.
In this conversation, three scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies - Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, and Goldie Osuri - reflect on how Asian settler colonial critique might usefully be mobilized toward understanding the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Asian settler colonial critique not only disrupts India's postcolonial narrative, but also shifts the conversation on Kashmir away from discourses of geopolitical security or bi-lateral relations between India and Pakistan.
In this paper we introduce the Moshiri Model, a framework to guide the process of de-imperialization that is rooted in Ainu in Diaspora spirituality and experience. Using reconstructed dialogues as a storytelling method, we illustrate what it can look like to engage in de-imperializing work within ourselves and our communities. Doing so requires confronting how internalized Japanese imperialism, Christian supremacy, and Zionism (and their historical interconnections) have shaped, and continue to shape, Asian settler colonialism. Ultimately, the de-imperialization work we describe aims to guide critical reflection about our individual and collective relationships with and responsibilities toward Indigenous communities.
My grandfather, Mehar Chand, was a "Pioneering Punjabi" who attempted to escape the Pacific coast's anti-Asian sentiment by moving to Texas. However, he ultimately faced an even more menacing racism in his new home. This essay situates his experiences within the broader historical and theoretical frameworks of ethnic niche and racial formation theories. Chand's story reveals the necessary fortitude the small number of Indian immigrants in the United States before the 1917 ban on India immigration needed to survive. Further, it highlights the underdiscussed experiences of the pioneering Punjabis who confronted systemic discrimination beyond California's borders.
This essay offers a portrait of Japanese Americans with disabilities who were incarcerated on U.S. soil during World War II. The unexpected presence of disability in the wartime camps challenged the War Relocation Authority's self-perception as caretaker, exposing tensions between its narrative of protection and the racial animus underlying Executive Order 9066. Camp systems imposed a pedagogical approach focused on managing non-normative bodies, while also exacerbating debility through bureaucratic violence. These stories illuminate the multiple layers of exclusion that limited individuals' access to citizenship and state protection.
