A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Elliott Jun

Elliott Jun (PhD candidate, CUNY Graduate Center English Department with a certificate in American Studies) presents “‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century” at this session of the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. This meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A Studies. Lunch will be served.

“‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century” investigates how Yuquot, a seasonal fishing village of the Mowachaht, became a key transpacific site where the multiple scales of racial capitalism and competing empires converged. Jun shows how crises in the royal monopoly system and plantation economy across the increasingly transhemispheric British empire in the late eighteenth century created the opportunity for private free traders like John Meares to look for their own solutions beyond the nation-state. They argue that Meares imagined and employed Chinese wage labour as a liberal solution to form a British settler transpacific that connected Yuquot, Hawai’i, Guangzhou, and Kolkata. While Meares’ experiment failed, Jun reflects on the ways in which studying the “failures” of colonial capitalism as method attunes us to pay attention to the fragility, contradictions, crisis, and reinvention that define colonialism, empire, and capital without foreclosing the relational possibilities of affinities organized around mutual struggle.