2025/03/14: Reimagining the Pacific Conference, University of Tokyo

Conference “Reimagining the Pacific: Towards an Oceanic Intellectual History”

https://www.gsi.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/event/6110/

Tokyo University Komaba Campus, March 13-14, 2025.

 

Paper title: “The Search for Modern Micronesia: Star-Shaped Genealogies of a Colonial Past.”

What is the role of Oceania in the history of the Japanese Empire? Historians have long sought to write sea and islands into the empire, keeping the apparently inconvertible encoding of Indigenous memory at arm’s length. This experimental contribution inverts such hierarchies by writing Japan into the framework of Oceanian history instead. Centered on the life and afterlives of Mori Koben, it explores the genealogies that sprawl out from Chuuk Lagoon along colonial power lines to Europe, Asia and America, locating the global origins of modern Micronesia in an “ancestral space-time” of Indigenous memory.

My search for modern Micronesia is a prompt to reconsider historiographical choices by foregrounding the meanings of migration, kinship and postcolonial dependencies. Disparate shapes of collective memory can inform novel modalities of writing––methods attuned to the multitude of possible storylines and to the social and material contexts of remembering, conveying and “practicing” history. I argue that engaging with the Micronesian experience at a methodological level can inspire new ways to meet the living memory where it stands: at the intersection of science, literature and artistic expression.