Transpacific Conjugations: Unmaking and Remaking Worlds

The aim of this chapter is to provoke a situated turn, or eco-conversion, toward a cultural-political way of thinking about worlding Pacific Rim cities as complex environmental formations connected to common resources and shared, if imbalanced, issues of watersheds, oceans, place, agricultural areas, race, and social justice. These issues cut across usual “urban-wilderness” and “country-city” divides that are coming undone in sites along the Pacific Rim, as inside and across Oceania. We need to think both globally and locally about cities and oceans and our urban patterns of dependence on plastic and its impact on formations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch conglomerating offshore to comprehend global cities such as San Francisco, Honolulu, Taipei, and Tokyo. Literature, framed in and as a process of world making, can help us see links between the city and the larger contado of the rural and uncultivated wilderness and the endangered planet.