Center for Pacific Island Studies

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recent publications

Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands, by Keith L Camacho (CPIS MA, 1998), is the latest volume (number 25) in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies–University of Hawai‘i Press Pacific Islands Monograph Series. It draws from an extensive archival base of government, military, and popular records to trace the formation of divergent colonial and indigenous histories in the Mariana Islands. Camacho describes how US colonial governance and Japanese colonial governance led to competing colonial histories that inform how American, Japanese, and Chamorros remember World War II in the islands. The author is an assistant professor of Pacific Islander studies in the Asian American Studies Department, University of California, Los Angeles.
The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific, edited by A Marata Tamaira (CPIS MA 2009), is CPIS Occasional Paper 44. This collection of graduate student essays, poetry, and art explores the indigenous Oceanic concept vā, a space marked by tension and transformation as well as confluences and connections. The art of Maui-born Roxanne Chasle is featured on the cover and throughout the volume. The Space Between is available electronically via ScholarSpace, the institutional digital archive of Hamilton Library, University of Hawai`i, Mänoa.
The latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (25:1, 2013) features articles on traditional knowledge regulation, meanings of women's island dress in Vanuatu, and a comparative analysis of literature from Guam, as well as the University of Otago's Pacific Research Protocols. The artists featured on the cover and throuhout this issue are part of the Jaki-Ed Collective in the Marshall Islands.

Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam, by Vicente M Diaz, is volume 24 in the center’s Pacific Islands Monograph Series. In the vein of an emergent Native Pacific brand of cultural studies, Repositioning the Missionary critically examines the cultural and political stakes of the historic and present-day movement to canonize Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores (1627–1672), the Spanish Jesuit missionary who was martyred by Mata'pang of Guam while establishing the Catholic mission among the Chamorros in the Mariana Islands. The work juxtaposes official, popular, and critical perspectives of the movement to complicate prevailing ideas about colonialism, historiography, and indigenous culture and identity in the Pacific.

Vicente Diaz is an associate professor of American Indian studies and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

The latest issue of the center’s newsletter Pacific News from Mānoa, is online. To be added to the electronic mailing list, please contact the editor, Katherine Higgins, at <khiggins@hawaii.edu>.