The Pacific Ocean, as this book asserts, is “not [simply] a garbage patch” (xi); instead, it is an agentic material assemblage that participates in planetary discourses. As Macarena Gómez-Barris puts it in her foreword, for instance, the world's largest body of water “biodynamically devours and expels . . . memories of [World War II], these hauntings and traces of the colonial/imperial divide” (xi). As such, the ocean materializes itself as “that wild and enormous container of cultural memory” (xiv).
An attunement to such nonhuman agency, albeit an understated one, animates Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. For more than Ann Laura Stoler's notion of “imperial debris” explicitly deployed throughout the book, it is the attention to the Pacific Ocean in its material ecology, including its colonial history, that makes the book's proposed “coalitional possibilities” (2) conceivable in the first place. And so, the “transpacific” functions here not...
