“Shades of Paradise”: Craig Santos Perez’s Transpacific Voyages

Craig Santos Perez’s work as a Chamorro teacher, scholar, poet, and activist provides a clear example of how archipelagic American studies encourages cultural specificity and yet works “nomadically” to connect with other peoples through a wide range of disciplines. His work is also characterized by its strategic repetitions of words, phrases, and places, often to indicate how buried Chamorro history has become by the colonial world system’s appropriative power. Focus is on Perez’s remarkable series of poems in his three volumes, from unincoporated territory [hacha] (2008), from unincorporated territory [saina] (2010), and from unincorporated territory[guma’] (2014). Written in English, Chamorro, Spanish, and Japanese, and combining documentary materials with mythic, literary, and family stories, the three volumes constitute an ongoing series in the writer’s effort to provide that cultural representation for the people of Guam (Guåhan) may be considered a precondition for their political sovereignty and decolonization.