Remaps the scope and methods of the transpacific approach
Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art illuminating everyday convergences between migrant workers in Hawai?i's hospitality industry. By foregrounding such complex entanglements within, across, and beyond the Pacific, Transpacific, Undisciplined activates generative, if obscured, connections against fixed national and methodological boundaries and reveals how an undisciplined approach can reconfigure itself in relation to unequal exchanges among Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.
With lucid contributions and a rich theoretical framework, this groundbreaking book resists geopolitical binaries to emphasize relations between peoples and populations who have long navigated imperial binds. In mobilizing the dynamic energy of the transpacific as an analytic, it brings together seemingly unrelated intellectual fields to trace across empires, local struggles, and inter-imperial intimacies. The book not only unsettles prominent discourses, it also invites discussion about unseen possibilities and new wayward histories, methods, and relations.

Lily Wong is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018).

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Christopher B. Patterson is associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020) and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (2018). Under his pen name Kawika Guillermo, he has published Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press, 2023), Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018), and All Flowers Bloom (Westphalia Press, 2020).

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Chien-ting Lin is an associate professor in the English Department at National Central University in Taiwan. He received his PhD in literature and cultural studies from University of California, San Diego, and has published articles in English and Chinese in several journals, including Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Review of International American Studies, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

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