Asia Pacific Flows. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xxxi, 313 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5521-5.
In Coral and Concrete, Greg Dvorak weaves together his life experiences and linguistic and research skills to create a unique and multidimensional understanding of Kwajalein Atoll and its history. Dvorak’s research accomplishes his goal of disrupting hegemonic histories, particularly narratives about Kwajalein constructed by the United States government that have the potential, as Dvorak notes, to become fact, or “concrete,” and silence other complex histories of place and people. With clever use of language—English, Japanese, and Marshallese—Dvorak’s disruption of postwar propagandized accounts of the events in the Marshall Islands creates spaces to amplify the dignity and stories of those who are dehumanized by colonial renderings of the past.
Coral and Concrete is the first major scholarship to study a single atoll in the Marshall Islands over time and to consider the cumulative impacts of Japanese and American colonialism alongside consistent and active Marshallese resistance to the settlers who sidelined the Marshallese on their own land. A strong theme throughout Coral and Concrete is the use of the Japanese and English discourse to naturalize the marginalization of the Marshallese from their land, even as Marshallese labour helped to construct the colonial fortifications on Kwajalein, while erasing the protests and resilience of the Marshallese people.
The majority of writing about Kwajalein Atoll focuses on the US militarism of the area in the aftermath of World War II as Kwajalein became the strategic base to coordinate US nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War, and US missile defense into the present day. For many people, the violence of US militarism, namely testing sixty-seven nuclear weapons, on the Marshall Islands was so severe the impacts of Japanese engagement often go overlooked, including the structural violence of racism that Dvorak illuminates in his research.
In chapter 3, Dvorak describes Japanese racial and ethnic renderings of the Marshallese between the world wars when Japan administered the Marshall Islands. Dvorak analyzes the discourse and historical video footage capturing Japanese boys at an elite school performing songs and dances depicting the Marshallese. Dvorak notes that these performances function as legitimization of Japanese imperial control of the islands, seen as necessary to assist the primitive people (67). In the video Dvorak researched, boys use charcoal blackface while holding bamboo spears amidst imagery of skulls and grass skirts that create racial constructions of Marshallese as akin to “plantation-era,” primitive black labourers. Dvorak’s analysis of Japanese racial categories at play in the Marshall Islands examines the borrowing of the Polynesian term “kanaka” to describe the Marshallese as black labourers, while simultaneously distinguishing the Marshallese from the fair-skinned, mixed-race Chamorros from northern Micronesia. Dvorak’s research into Japanese-era racial constructions is critically important because it sheds light on the troubling discourse between lighter-skinned Chamorros and a “plantation-era category” of Micronesians that is still evident today in regional racial identity politics.
Coral and Concrete draws on numerous research methodologies that surface the stories of place, and marginalization that dominant historical narratives threaten to erase from our histories and understandings, including the contributions of Korean and Okinawan labour to Japan’s building of infrastructure on Kwajalein and other atolls in the Marshall Islands. Dvorak provides a sensitive and thoughtful juxtaposition between his upbringing in the American fortified community of mostly civilian workers that supports US military activities on Kwajalein Atoll, and the unmarked histories that preceded US occupation, and includes examples, such as how a pristine golf course for the middle class fails to mark the same location as a labour camp, battlefield, or place of immense suffering and sorrow. As Dvorak emphasizes, the American overlaying of sediment on Kwajalein Atoll obscures Marshallese and Japanese engagements with the people and place. The US military renamed the entire landscape on Kwajalein, which has the impact of naturalizing the Americanization, masculinization, and militarization of ancestral Marshallese homelands.
A methodological strength of Dvorak’s analysis of historical photographs shows how visual and written discourses marginalize the Marshallese people on their own land by rendering the Marshallese as simple bystanders to colonial activities on Kwajalein. Discourse analysis of the historical photos shows the construction of a narrative placing the US as liberators who freed the Marshall Islands from a brutal Japanese regime, and sets the stage for the US takeover of the islands, not dissimilar from the racialized justification for imperial control evident in Japanese renderings from previous decades. As Dvorak notes, US images and narratives “disallows Marshallese agency and renders unimportant the various Marshallese legacies of survival and resistance to colonialism” (97). Future researchers can take Dvorak’s analysis further by considering how Marshallese use imposed classifications or discourse for their own purposes, such as through the use of the term “kanaka” on Likiep Atoll in the Marshall Islands, an offensive categorization of the lowest tier of workers, or through continued Marshallese use of the word “victims” in relation to the nuclear weapons testing legacy (e.g. Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day), alongside Marshallese notions of resilience and strength.
Any critiques of Coral and Concrete are minor considering the significant scholarly contribution (e.g. it is unclear whether Dvorak’s extensive use of Marshallese perspectives emerge from recorded interviews, or represent paraphrasing as there are no citations for these passages). Dvorak’s vast linguistic and research skills broker conversations and understandings that are complex, holistic, and original. Dvorak adds a critical layer of interpretation to the multiple readings of Kwajalein’s “atollscape” by bringing Japan’s sedimentary record on the atoll into conversation with Marshallese and American engagements in a manner that humanizes the author as a researcher as well as the Marshallese, Okinawan, and Korean histories on Kwajalein that Dvorak brings into view. Coral and Concrete is beautifully researched and poetic in style as Dvorak unfolds the multiple layers of Kwajalein across time and space. Using coral as a “metaphor of deep time,” Dvorak creates a space for readers, like the coral, “to break the surface of the water and make islet after islet, connected by reef, to form atolls” of new understandings and possibilities (18).
Holly M. Barker
University of Washington, Seattle, USA