Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces the concept of a transpacific settler colonial condition, a term which captures the interconnected nature of Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism across the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, given shared histories of American empire and military violence. In order to historicize the transpacific settler colonial condition's coarticulation with Asian American political subjectivity, ever since the Asian American Movement of the Long Sixties, this article turns to two works of Asian American historical fiction: Shawn Wong's Homebase (1979), one of the first self-identified works of Asian American literature, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015), a contemporary best-selling novel. Both texts call attention to the interconnected nature of Indigenous sovereignty struggles across the continental United States, Guam, and Vietnam and grapple with the vexed positionality of Asian American subjects who at times uphold transpacific settler colonialism and at other times resist it. The article ends with a call for transpacific decolonization via a feminist refugee epistemology.