“Currents we have to swim against in this global sea”: imperial hegemony, migration, and counternarrative in and beyond Micronesia
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This dissertation analyzes relations between the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the United States (US) with attention to the bilateral Compact of Free Association as a mediating technology that continuously shapes and is reshaped by cultural and environmental politics of place, (de/re)territorialization, and mobilities. Western discourses tend to render Micronesia as adrift between the power competition of global hegemons in the contemporary era. The dissertation builds from a geocultural framework to articulate an historical-relational sociology of global connection that centers Micronesia against the spatial peripheralization of colonial racial capitalism. The study locates how the US and multilateral entities conceive of Micronesia and, more broadly, the world’s oceans, as extensions of the humanitarian/security state through racialized, militarized, and settler-extractivist imaginaries of the technofrontier. It also engages with Micronesian senses of place, heritage, and (embodied) mobility practices as counternarratives to these forms of imperial hegemony and governmentality. Drawing from rich traditions of interdisciplinary scholarship, this dissertation utilizes critical discourse analysis of secondary data including media items from news and popular culture, political speeches and documents, Micronesian podcast transcripts, and texts and discourses relevant to the three iterations of the Compact of Free Association. The dissertation also includes primary data collected in interviews with diasporic Micronesians to explicate alternative Micronesian continuities and futurities while showing how they are laden with dynamics of precarity, contingency, and possibility in imperial migration governance. This dissertation contributes to ongoing discussions of Micronesian continuity through the lens of intra-acting historiography and narrativization of Micronesia’s “place” in the Pacific and the world, which is especially pertinent in the aftermath of the Compact of Free Association’s recent renewal until 2043 and the concurrent acceleration of the climate crisis.
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Ph. D.