Review of Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures by Erin Suzuki (Temple University Press)

Kiribati detail of Diasporic Waters (2014) by Joy Lehuanani Enomoto

Erin Suzuki’s Ocean Passages is a sustained analysis of how various narratives of “ocean passages” disrupt and revise hegemonic constructions of the Pacific. Through analyses of contemporary Indigenous Pacific and Asian American literatures, Suzuki demonstrates what new paradigms can emerge by bringing Asian and Pacific Islander passages across the same sea into critical relationality.