Waking to Global Capitalism and Oceanic Decentering: Reworlding US Poetics across Native Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Rim

As a signifier of techno-urban development, the Pacific Rim still enchants in its mysterious allure, as if this geo-imaginary moved toward a utopic destiny hailing disparate countries into its transnational coalition of region, place, community, motivation, and cultural identity. The vast Pacific Ocean and its alluring ring of volcanic formations links this “Rim” into a common planetary future and becoming-capitalist urban formation. Islands in such a calculus hardly signal any strong difference from the mainland, even as they are (by archipelagic ties) attached to as oceanic appendices. Conceiving the Pacific Rim as a transcultural region of imagined transnational belonging across Oceania might allow us to forge a different pedagogy, history, and framework of canonization wherein once minor or occluded energy and formations are given renewed agency they have long deserved as cultural-political semiotics. The works of Joseph Balaz, Queen Lili’uokalani, and Teresia Teaiwa are invoked to embody this Oceania poetics.