Course analyzes songs, art, and literature by Pacific women and feminist allies. Focuses on the Pacific Ocean as the central place of transit of global oil, goods, and capital between Asia and North America. Explores Indigenous activists’ role in creating new discourse to resist petrocapitalism, imperialism, and environmental racism.
Why turn to the Pacific to explore modes of resistance to petrocapitalism? Because Pacific communities already live in a post-apocalyptic world. Pacific islands have been used as the West’s primary nuclear testing site. With the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day, every day, for half a century, the region has already experienced the environmental collapse looming over the rest of the world. Pacific climate activists draw from their experiences under nuclear colonialism to build a different type of climate activism, based on mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. They teach how to mourn for what has been lost, and how to find the strength to keep fighting for that which remains.
Focusing on women’s contribution is not only a matter of ethics; it transforms the type of questions that get asked. It challenges what constitutes valid forms of political discourse, and critiques the climate movement’s patriarchal tendency to favor administrative language and statistical reports at the expense of embodied knowledge and emotional experience. Pacific women’s stories are post-apocalyptic in the etymological sense of the word: they help to uncover, to reveal alternative modes of being in the world. These are the type of stories that may inspire environmental activists worldwide, particularly in other Indigenous-led frontlines against petrocapitalism.