ABSTRACT
Current (geo)political and economic developments, as well as the ongoing transpacific flow of people, ideas, and goods have triggered a surge of interest in the Pacific as a region, an object of academic study, as well as a source of important political, scholarly, and artistic work by Pacific Islanders themselves. The materiality of the world’s oceans and the impact of human activity on maritime ecologies – particularly through globalized economic networks and routes of trade – is a central concern of current ecocritical debates across all disciplines. In “Crosscurrents,” Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez also highlights oceanic affinities across the globe. The critical analysis of discourses of imperialism in the Pacific presents us with another important current within transpacific studies. Juliane Braun’s contribution “‘Strange Beasts of the Sea’: Captain Cook, the sea otter and the creation of a transoceanic American Empire” also follows this line of interrogation.
