The Center for the Americas sponsors a yearly Americas Forum. The theme of the forum reflects the Center's commitment
to interdisciplinary and hemispheric studies.
Center for the Americas
Americas Forum 2006
Politics of Sovereignty: Colonial Legacies in Oceania
Mapping Native Chamorro Resistance to Spanish and
American Imperialism in the Mariana Islands
Vicente M. Diaz, Asian/Pacific Islander American
Studies, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan
Lessons from the Puerto Rican and Hawaiian Sovereignty
Struggles
José Luis Morín, Puerto Rican/Latin American Studies
Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City
University of New York
Self-determination or integration? The uneasy
relationship between Rapa Nui and Chile
Riet Delsing, Department of Anthropology, University
of California at Santa Cruz
Moderator, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, American Studies and
Anthropology, Wesleyan University
2:30 PM, September 29
Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies
Reception to follow
Please contact Joanne Palmer, jpalmer@wesleyan.edu,
or at 806/685-3112 if you have any questions about this event.
With the "discovery" of the "New" World in the late
fifteenth century, Spanish imperialist expansion and colonialism swept over the
Americas and into the Pacific. From Magellan's voyage into the Pacific,
including Guam and the Philippines, in the 1520s to Peruvian slave traders
kidnapping Polynesians from various islands, including Tuvalu and Tokelau, in
the 1860s, Spaniards and Latin Americans treated the Pacific as an extension of
their “New” World. Much later, after the Spanish-American War at the turn of
the twentieth century, the United States asserted dominion throughout the
Pacific Basin and the Caribbean. In 1898, the United States acquired Puerto
Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain through the Treaty of Paris, as
well as Hawai`i by Congressional resolution. In 1899, the United States also
annexed what is now known as American Samoa. The 2006 Americas Forum proposes
to explore the overlapping histories of “New” World encroachments in the Pacific
in a symposium on the politics of sovereignty in Oceania that examines Spanish
and U.S. colonialism in Guam, the Chilean annexation and colonization of Rapa
Nui (Easter Island), and the ongoing struggles over political status in both
Hawai`i and Puerto Rico where there are thriving nationalist movements. The
Forum symposium features scholars whose work maps cultural and legal
interventions related to questions of sovereignty, self-governance, nationhood,
and identity that are the legacy of multiple colonialisms in these islands.
