[Commlist] CFP: Media Fields Journal Issue 15: Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti)Imperial Pacific

The Media Fields Research Collective at UC Santa Barbara is excited to 
announce its call for papers for /Media Fields Journal/ Issue 15: *Media 
Cultures of the (Inter/Anti)Imperial Pacific*

*Submission Deadline: *April 1, 2019

Recent controversies—from protracted battles over international tariff 
structures to renewed nuclear sabre rattling between the United States 
and North Korea, and from the brutalities of offshore migrant detention 
in places like Nauru to the construction of artificial islands in the 
South China Sea—have thrust the Pacific theater to the forefront of 
global geopolitical attention. But while these disputes often appear in 
the guise of crisis, as urgent, largely unanticipated outbreaks of 
acrimony, they are in many ways historically implicated. As Kornel Chang 
writes, the Pacific has long been a deeply vexed geopolitical and 
cultural domain, a vast theater of “interimperial” encounter striated by 
the violences of colonial settlement, neocolonial retrenchment, 
capitalist exploitation, racial domination, and military conquest. But 
if these are political and cultural histories, they are at the same time 
media histories. Indeed, since at least the mid-19th century, media and 
communication technologies have played a central role both in the 
consolidation of imperial ambitions across the Pacific, as well as in 
the manifold ways these ambitions have been sabotaged, undermined, and 
refused. Seeking to thematize these complex and ongoing histories, issue 
15 of /Media Fields Journal/ will explore the media cultures of the 
(inter/anti) imperial Pacific.

In recent years, scholars of media and technology have turned often 
toward the Pacific, showing how the region’s overlapping histories of 
colonization and imperial expansion have fundamentally shaped global 
communication infrastructures, and vice versa. Nicole Starosielski, for 
instance, has shown the remarkable degree to which contemporary undersea 
cable networks, particularly those that connect the west coast of North 
America with the Asia Pacific, retrace nineteenth- and twentieth-century 
colonial trading routes, transposing the lineaments of territorial 
empire into a fiber optic register. Ruth Oldenziel, similarly, has read 
the Pacific as a techno-imperial palimpsest, uncovering the surprising 
geographic and logistical continuities between colonial coaling 
stations, early electric telegraph networks, and the shortwave 
communications infrastructures that proliferated across the Pacific in 
the Cold War years. Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, finally, have 
reconstructed in painstaking detail the emergence of coherent 
communications markets in and around the Asia Pacific after about 1860—a 
project that played out through a baffling choreography of interimperial 
negotiation and corporate shell gaming.

In the hopes of extending these important contributions in new 
directions, we seek original scholarship that explores how media have 
functioned as tools of imperial governance in the Pacific since the 19th 
Century, as well as their involvement in struggles for otherwise Pacific 
worlds and decolonial futures. To this end, we invite contributions that 
bring media history, theory and analysis into sustained conversation 
with such fields as Native American and Indigenous studies, postcolonial 
theory, critical race and ethnic studies, island and ocean studies, and 
archipelagic American studies (see Roberts & Stephens, 2017). However, 
we encourage submissions from all those whose work explores the richness 
and vitality of Pacific media cultures—whether historical, contemporary, 
or emergent—through the lenses of imperiality, coloniality, and/or 
decolonization. Moreover, even as we acknowledge the abiding hegemony of 
the United States across much of the Pacific theater, we strongly 
encourage submissions that provincialize US- and Anglo-centric 
perspectives, and approach the question of Pacific imperiality from 
alternative national and/or geopolitical contexts.

Potential topics for papers include but are not limited to:

●      Indigenous media theory, history, and critique

●      Comparative and differential Indigeneities

●      The technopolitics of imperial administration

●      Activist media: anti-imperialism, decolonization, Indigenous 
sovereignty

●      The aesthetic and representational politics of (de)colonization

●      Piracy, hacking, and sabotage

●      Trauma, memory, and the archive

●      Oceanic media infrastructures

●      Colonial and imperial nostalgia

●      South-South/East-East solidarities

●      Critical political economy: tariffs, trade, intellectual 
property, informality

●      Gender, sexuality, and desire

●      Past futures: Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, Nuclear 
Non-Proliferation

●      Environmental disruption and resource extraction (seafloor 
dredging, artificial island construction, mining, dumping, pollution, 
sea level rise)

●      Media policy and regulation in/of colonial states

●      Media, technology, and discourses of development

●      (Mili)tourism

●      Techno-orientalism

●      (Revisiting) the cultural imperialism thesis

●      Analytics of migration and settlement: the settler, the ‘coolie,’ 
the arrivant, the ‘free laborer,’ the indentured, etc.

●      Asian settler colonialism (see Okamura & Fujikane, 2008; 
Saranillio, 2013)

●      Empire and/as media distribution

●      Media and scalarity: locality, regionality, nationality, 
globality, and the hemispheric

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Tyler Morgenstern 
((tylermorgenstern /at/ ucsb.edu)) and Xiuhe Zhang ((xiuhezhang /at/ ucsb.edu)).

Submissions should be approximately *1500–2500 words*, and should 
include at least one image or audio or video clip related to the essay 
topic. Email submissions to (submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org).

For more information and complete submission guidelines, please visit 
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org

*References:*

Kornel Chang, /Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian 
Borderlands /(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

Jonathan Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane (editors), /Asian Settler 
Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in 
Hawai/ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in 
/Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold 
War/, edited by Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 13-41.

Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (editors), /Archipelagic 
American Studies /(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Why Asian settler colonialism matters: a 
thought piece on critiques, debates, and Indigenous difference,"/Settler 
Colonial Studies 3/, 4 (2013), 280-294.

Nicole Starosielski, /The Undersea Network /(Durham and London: Duke 
University Press,2015).

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, /Communication and Empire: Media, 
Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930/ (Durham and London: Duke 
University Press, 2007).


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