Articles by Erin Suzuki
Cheesiness as Neocolonial Aesthetic
Amerasia, 2014
This article is open access and available through Amerasia Journalʻs website (see link above).
Genealogy and Geography in Patricia Grace's Tu
Mfs Modern Fiction Studies, 2012
Haunted Homelands: Negotiating Locality in Father of the Four Passages
Mfs-modern Fiction Studies, 2010
Frauds and Gods: The Politics of Religion in Melville’s Omoo and Mardi
Esq: A Journal of The American Renaissance, 2008
Consuming Desires: Melancholia and Consumption in" Blu's Hanging
MELUS, 2006
Literature/Film Quarterly, 2006
Paradise Lost: James Fenimore Cooper and the Pursuit of Empire in the American Pacific
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... Against this backdrop, even Natty Bumppo's heroic life pales in significance: at the con... more ... Against this backdrop, even Natty Bumppo's heroic life pales in significance: at the conclusion of the novel he passes away, facing the western ... Woolston's grasses are not only self-propagating, but also healthy, strong, and "vigorous": the roots that he lays are strong and deep ...
Book Chapters by Erin Suzuki
Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965, 2021
Constructed around literary representations of four ecological formations – desert, island, ocean... more Constructed around literary representations of four ecological formations – desert, island, ocean, and swamp – this chapter explores how Asian American and Pacific Islander literary representations of these environments have contributed materially and conceptually to the shaping of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Using these environments as a framework for cultural analysis allows for an exploration of multifaceted and complex Asian American identities that define themselves not only in terms of their entanglement with shifting categories of race and citizenship within the US, but also in terms of how these categories intersect and interact with the expansion of US geopower worldwide. If the development of US global hegemony during the twentieth century was intimately tied to a political geography that framed deserts, islands, oceans, and swamps as discrete territorial units that could be managed and controlled, literary representations of these same environments by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have worked to highlight the ways that they often escaped or exceeded this dominant paradigm of containment.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020
The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacifi... more The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Oceanic studies. In particular, following Lisa Yoneyama’s model for examining “decolonial genealogies of transpacific studies,” such a reevaluation emphasizes interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and, above all, a reckoning with settler taxonomies of intellectual production as vital to the continued use of the term. Beginning with a review of key scholarly interventions into the “settler colonial grammar of AA/PI,” this article relates the US histories and logics that first produced the categories “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” and brought them into categorical relation with one another. These historical entanglements between diasporic and Indigenous movements across and through the Pacific, can be understood through cultural analysis of literary works that reconfigure transpacific studies around Oceanic passages and Pacific currents highlighting an Indigenous-centered regional formation. Rather than allowing transpacific discourses to dismiss the Pacific Islands as distant or remote “islands in a far sea,” such an approach recasts the region along the lines of what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa formulates as an interconnected “sea of islands.” It concludes by considering the ongoing harm produced by settler epistemologies of possessive liberal
Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Island Literature, 2014
Transpacific" is a term that is as fluid and dynamic as the oceanic terrain it navigates. Broadly... more Transpacific" is a term that is as fluid and dynamic as the oceanic terrain it navigates. Broadly used to describe the routes and infrastructures that enable the movement of peoples and goods across and around the Pacific (as in "transpacific shipping" and "transpacific trade"), within the context of contemporary Asian American studies the concept of the transpacific has come to express the ways that different Asian, Pacific Island, and American cultures and communities mutually shape one another as they circulate throughout the region. A transpacific frame for cultural and literary analysis necessarily calls attention to the very different and often unequal circumstances that shape the conditions of these moments of contact, conflict, and exchange: for example, one of the legacies of British colonization and American militarization in the region is the use of English and English-based creoles in the transpacific literatures that this chapter will explore. In this context, transpacific cultural criticism increasingly attends to the ways that transnational affiliations that appear to exceed or transcend the boundaries of the nation have in fact been materially re-routed, revived, or inhibited by imperial histories, national cultures, and the nation-state. It is in this spirit that Yunte Huang (2008) famously defines the transpacific as a semiotic space that mediates between competing national narratives and the "authoritative regimes of epistemology" that enable them (see Huang 2008: 5). In what follows, I elaborate on this idea of the transpacific as well as several alternative transpacifics that inform the terrain of Asian Americanist literary studies, ranging from those originating in sixteenth-century trade routes; those offered by indigenous mappings of the region (drawing attention to the way that dominant economic and cultural discourses of the Asia-Pacific have placed them under erasure); analyses of the military-tourist infrastructures that span the region; and the vast ecological networks that are shaped by yet also operate independently of human agency.
Book Reviews by Erin Suzuki
The Contemporary Pacific, 2013
Papers by Erin Suzuki
America's Empire and the Asia-Pacifi c: Constructing Hawai'i and the Philippines
The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, 2015
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Articles by Erin Suzuki
Book Chapters by Erin Suzuki
Book Reviews by Erin Suzuki
Papers by Erin Suzuki