Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. Juliana Hu Pegues

Juliana Hu Pegues’s Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements and Erin Suzuki’s Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures highlight and dismantle the hegemonic constructions of race and space at the heart of US colonialism and neoliberalism. By exploring the historical and discursive connections between the Indigenous and Asian American populations of Alaska and the Pacific, these books illuminate the affinities and shared experiences of racialized and colonized peoples from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, both books reveal cross-cultural networks and intimacies that have been occluded by narratives of settler colonialism and capitalist expansion.

Building on recent work in Asian American studies and the emergent field of Alaska Native studies, Space-Time Colonialism explores the interrelated histories of Indigenous land dispossession and Asian labor exploitation in Alaska, focusing particularly on the discursive strategies that enabled the disavowal of both processes. Hu Pegues coins the term space-time colonialism to describe how settler colonial logics of time and space “worked in tandem to simultaneously conceal and authorize” the foundational violence of the settler colonial project (14). Drawing from an array of literary, oral, and visual texts, Hu Pegues charts “the contingent racialization and gendering of Native and Asian peoples in Alaska” over four historical periods: the 1867 US purchase of the region, the gold rush era, the period surrounding the territorial incorporation of Alaska in 1912, and the militarization of Alaska during World War II (2). While Alaska Natives were written out of Alaska’s territorial future through temporal narratives that relegated them to the past, Asian migrants were excluded according to a spatial logic that denied their status as legitimate inhabitants of the region. Together, these narratives naturalized the white settler state while rendering illegible the shared antagonisms and cross-cultural intimacies between Alaska’s Asian and Indigenous populations.