As noted, race was the distinguishing mark of race relations, culture, of(Chicago) ethnic studies, and both discourses functioned to maintain therelations of power. By the time the Third World Liberation Front was estab-lished, (Chicago) ethnic studies was the prevailing ideology in US society.That is, races were reduced to cultures, and the celebration of ethnicity and di-versity was the ticket to the big tent of inclusion, citizenship, and rights—theperceived goals of the civil rights movement

INTRODUCTION

hat is to be expected. We therefore offered workshopsfor beginners to which we invited, through newspaper advertisements,young people between eighteen and twenty-four years of age, who are noton full-time study or employment, because these latter would treat art as ahobby to be indulged in their spare time.

Sixth, we aim to produce a corpus of contemporary works readily acces-sible to our educational institutions and our communities

Fifth, we aim to harness creativity to our practical struggle for survival.

Fourth, we aim to produce visual and performing arts that are regional,transcending our national insularity and cultural diversity

Third, we aim to develop our own criteria for assessing the aestheticmerit and other cultural values of our contemporary creations

Second, the creativity unleashed should reflect important principles ofour societies—in particular reciprocity, cooperation, openness to commu-nity, and transmission of knowledge and skills through observation andhands-on experience.

Our first objective was, and still is, the cultivation of a spiritof creative originality that would lead to the flourishing of contemporaryvisual and performing arts that are firmly rooted in our histories, traditions,and adaptations to the changing international environment that is affect-ing every facet of our existence

And we developed the cardinal rule of not makinginsistent demands on the university, especially on its financial resources.Such demands would attract unwelcome attention to what we were notsupposed to be doing. Complaints would have attracted a similar response,so we never complained.

There are modern artists working in Fiji, for example, but most areeither foreigners or Oceanians who have studied fi ne arts overseas or learnedfrom resident Western artists. The content and some of the materials usedmay be local, but the styles, the perspectives, and the aesthetic values areall non-Oceanian

The people of the island of Tanna in Vanuatu conceive of theiruniverse in terms of the tree and the canoe. The tree symbolises rootednessin culture, while the canoe stands for movements along sea routes that con-nect people of different island locations

The development at our university of a space or community dedicatedto reflection, exploration, and originality is based on the belief that in orderto be continuously creative, we must have spaces where we give free rein toour imagination and ample time to experiment with and develop new formsand styles, new movements, sounds, and voices, that are unmistakably ours

therwise redesigned to synchronise their activities with theprocesses of globalisation

months or so he flies to Fiji, buys $8,000 to $10,000 worth of kava, takes iton the plane flying him back to California, and sells it from his home.

Econo-mists do not take account of the social centrality of the ancient practice ofreciprocity—the core of all oceanic cultures. They overlook the fact thatfor everything homeland relatives receive, they reciprocate with goods theythemselves produce, by maintaining ancestral roots and lands for everyone,homes with warmed hearths for travellers to return to permanently or tostrengthen their bonds, their souls, and their identities before they moveon again.

The new economic reality made nonsense of artificial bound-aries, enabling the people to shake off their confinement. They have sincemoved, by the tens of thousands, doing what their ancestors did in earliertimes: enlarging their world, as they go, on a scale not possible before.

Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the con-traction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the PacificIsland states and territories that we know today. People were confined totheir tiny spaces, isolated from each other. No longer could they travelfreely to do what they had done for centuries. They were cut off from theirrelatives abroad, from their far-flung sources of wealth and cultural enrich-ment. This is the historical basis of the view that our countries are small,poor, and isolated. It is true only insofar as people are still fenced in andquarantined

It was in the interest of imperialism—and is inthe interest of neocolonialism—to promote this blatant misconception ofMela nesia.3

Smallness is a state of mind

But the faces of my students continued to haunt me mercilessly. I beganasking questions of myself

According to this view, the small island statesand territories of the Pacific, that is, all of Polynesia and Micronesia, are toosmall, too poorly endowed with resources, and too isolated from the centresof economic growth for their inhabitants ever to be able to rise above theirpresent condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations

In many societies it was partand parcel of indigenous cultures. In the aristocratic societies of Polynesia,parallel relationships of dominance and subordination with their parapher-nalia of appropriate attitudes and behaviour were the order of the day. InTonga, the term for commoners is me‘a vale, “the ignorant ones,” which isa survival from an era when the aristocracy controlled all important knowl-edge in the society.

Even indigenous policemen were called “police boys.”This use of language helped to reinforce the colonially established socialstratification along ethnic divisions. Colonial practices and denigration por-trayed Melanesian peoples and cultures as even more primitive and bar-baric than those of Polynesia

Moreover, academic and consultancy expertstend to overlook or misinterpret grassroots activities because they do not fitwith prevailing views about the nature of society and its development.

e first level is that of national governments and regionaland international diplomacy, in which the present and future of PacificIsland states and territories are planned and decided on.

, Oceanic is used as an analytic to describethe material ways in which Indigeneity and place shape the specificityof transoceanic experiences in Hawai‘i

ilipinx Studies:

sex danger,

Oceanic Filipinx studies in Hawai‘i is an approach that locates thesewaves of localized clashing histories in order to expose and erode theoverlapping and intersecting systemic legacies of US empire

In curating this special issue, we were critical in notromanticizing seas in our turn towards the oceanic. Instead, wewanted to highlight how oceans can also be a site of turbulence.

This special issue gestures towards anOceanic Filipinx studies in Hawai‘i that empowers Filipinx to intimatelyknow and meditate on their social position in relation to the waves ofcultural knowledges, languages, and stories that reside here in Filipinx/a/o Hawai‘i. We can then strategically mobilize these cultural energiestowards collective liberation for Filipinx, Kānaka Maoli, and all otherdifferently displaced diasporic, local, Black, and Brown communitieswho call Hawai‘i land, seas, and skies home in ways that do not drawfalse equivalences in search of commonalities

This caused me to beashamed of and loathe who I was even when I acknowledged that Iwas not mocked “as badly” as my recent immigrant peers.

Latinx feminist scholar Bianet Castellanos terms, positioned assettler in Hawai‘i.8 With Oceanic Filipinx studies’ particular focus onplace, this framework exposes how Hawai‘i is simultaneously home andnot home at the same time. The Philippine-US empires have positionedme here in Hawai‘i as a settler who benefits from Kānaka Maolidispossession.

Are they high-class private-school kine? Are theypublic-school proud like me? Are they Kalihi-bred? Or, are they noteven from Hawai‘i

Can we do Filipinx studies that is not directly connectedto the homeland or to the Philippine nation-state? Is it a settler moveto focus on the places where we live, that is not our homeland? Sowhat can an Oceanic Filipinx studies in Hawai‘i look like? How can wedefine this emerging field?

Epeli Hau’ofa initially re-imagined an Oceania that did notinclude the Philippines:On the eastern extremity of the region, there were someinfluences from the Americas, but these were minimal. Forthese reasons, Pacific Ocean islands, from Japan through thePhilippines and Indonesia, which are adjacent to the Asianmainland, do not have Oceanic cultures, and are therefore notpart of Oceania.

They are not meant to be prescriptive mappings of the field butrather a provocation and marking of emerging transoceanic currentsthat make up the field. This dialogue is like waves in a sea, propelledby various winds. These waves travel at different speeds creating aswell, and sometimes there are storm-generated waves that movethousands of miles (to Hawai‘i) and create an intellectual groundswell

Theorizing Oceanic

Blu’sHanging

For Rod, the controversy wasnot so much about whether or not we knew how to read and analyze,or artistic license and censorship, but it revealed how we generallyknew so little about racial and ethnic dynamics in the islands andperhaps even less about Filipinxs in Hawai‘i

lace-based knowledge

idea of oceans/seas and theoceanic to anchor our histories, cultures, and politics. F

A photo of him at a strike rally of Okinawan baseworkers in 1971 shows him raising his fist in the air. There are also photosfrom 1971 showing meetings between black soldiers, white activists, andOkinawan activists. In the background of one such meeting, as shown inFigure 5.3, is the famous poster of Black Panther Party leader Huey New-ton sitting in a wicker chair holding a rifle and spear.

m Yu to Us: Koza as a Nexus of Internal, External,

erican World): American Occupatio

yu (The World of War): The Battle

amatu yu (The Japanese World): Japanese Colonization

he Koza Uprisi

am reminded and comforted by Hoffman’s artwork, not for its ability to settle any of thediscussions that I have raised in this essay, but rather pointing us in a possible direction. Sea andMissed’s fragmentation of the landscape and the imaginative possibilities of dislocation point tothe agency of the Filipinx diaspora to re-think our relationship to the lands we move through andto the people who live there. In this way, the question of being Filipinx on Indigenous land–-whether in Okinawa or Morro Bay–-is a discussion that Filipinxs everywhere must take uptogether.

This is a result of the passing of theolder generation who are at the forefront of the demilitarization movement today, as well as theyounger generation who are more accepting of the bases they have known their whole lives.

While dislocation is often seen in a negative light, See and Missedrecasts the liminal position of Filipinx Americans as a strength, one where we are invited tocreate and imagine ourselves on our own terms, which is important when thinking about ourintellectual objectives and the scholarly practices that we follow.

et the fragmentation ofthe land in See and Missed points to an incomplete narrative, one where the role of Filipinxs isnot set in stone. This fragmentation of the land can be read as the diasporic experience ofdislocation from both the Philippines and America.

Considering Hoffman’s play on the conventions of landscape paintings, thefragmentation of the land in See and Missed suggests both Indigenous continuity and space forFilipinx viewers to consider ourselves in this history on our own terms

In this way, the orientation of my work largelycenters on addressing the connections that are shared between these two archipelagoes. 24 It alsofocuses on supporting the demilitarization movement in Okinawa and the Okinawan diaspora.2

These two forms of separation—geographic distance on onehand, and knowledge production on the other—have a genealogy that is historically linked to theUnited States’ Cold War apparatus to produce expert knowledge for US interests. This expertknowledge that was produced from area studies represented itself as objective through theconcealment of positionality which reproduced a discourse of the West and the Rest

While I do think that for many scholars, Philippine studies and Filipinx American studies are notmutually exclusive fields in practice, I do think that the narrative of separation that structuresthese two formations as distant is longstanding and worth returning to, especially whenconsidering the potential interventions that an Oceanic Filipinx studies can bring

Rather than a project that recuperates a Filipinx narrative that upholds, and neatlyharmonizes into, the general American story, Hoffman’s See and Missed instead invites theviewer to consider the messy question of what it means to be Filipinx on Indigenous land, andhow this may inform new ways of seeing ourselves, and the greater world, in the process.

. In this way, my analysis of Hoffman’s See andMissed, in addition to my reflections on Okinawa, is meant to add to our geographical referencepoints beyond Hawai‘i as part of this larger project of Oceanic Filipinx studies

For example, atCal Poly, Filipinx students organized the 2023 production of Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) andmade a conscious decision to replace the “Star-Spangled Banner” with a land acknowledgementat the beginning of their show, as a way to signal their solidarity with Indigenous peoples and toreject the United States

n his uplifting articulation of “Our Sea of Islands,”Hau‘ofa rejects such belittling discourses and insists on the worldmaking agency of PacificIsland peoples through their diasporic movements across the ocean

In the context of Filipinx American andDiasporic Studies, these intellectual and creative engagements with the ocean can be viewed as alarger move to re-imagine the Philippines and the Filipinx diaspora beyond fixed areacategories–-such as “Southeast Asia”-–and towards more similarly with what Pacific scholarEpeli Hau‘ofa has famously referred to as “Our Sea of Islands