The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y. Okihiro’s most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro’s previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time, memoir and history, and the historian and the writing of history. Okihiro uses himself—from Okinawan roots, growing up on a sugar plantation in Hawai'i, researching in Botswana, and teaching in California—to reveal the historian’s craft involving diverse methodologies and subject matters. Okihiro’s imaginative narrative weaves back and forth through decades and across vast spatial and societal differences, theorized as historical formations, to critique history’s conventions. Taking its title from a translation of the author’s surname, The Boundless Sea is a deeply personal and reflective volume that challenges how we think about time and space, notions of history.
Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Visiting Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His most recent book is Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. The Boundless Sea is the third volume in a trilogy on space and time. The first volume is Island World: A History of Hawai'i and the United States, and the second is Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones.
"Historian Gary Okihiro brings together in elegant and beautiful prose the many threads of his life and career in a synthesis of memoir, history, and meditations on the writing of history, creating a brilliant global panorama connected by the boundless sea. From his family’s origins on Okinawa to the sugar fields of Hawai'i, 'poisoned by white supremacy,' to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans and his own youthful immersion in Third World liberation, Okihiro emerges as a lifetime student of history, as well as of making history."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
"Let us think of our world as an un-geographed geology before nation-states could claim nativism: 'with every breath we take we are inhaling the Pacific, the generator of two thirds of the earth's oxygen.' Air and water, and islands on and in them. In Gary Okihiro's most recent book, The Boundless Sea, where there is plenty of poetic nativism, there is also absolute acknowledgment of complicity on the part of the author—a Hawaiian Japanese U.S. scholar of Africa, and an archival account of the Japanese predicament in and after World War II, that frames the poetic nativist impulse. This kind of approach, which asks for redistributive epistemological change in knower and known, can rescue nativism into the necessary acknowledgement of complicity. Rather than put nativism in a binary opposition, with what? I would recommend this acknowledgment of being folded together, as democratic rationalists, with the impulsive desire for being-native, re-written."—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
"Professor Okihiro presents us here with a captivating exploration of the Asian Pacific and African historical experiences, drawing on his own life encounters with those histories both to cast powerful light on their human consequences and to draw in the reader as a partner in that journey of discovery."—Christopher Ehret, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
"A preeminent, pioneer scholar of Asian American studies and race and ethnic studies, Okihiro writes eloquently, movingly, even poetically about the arc of his personal life and intellectual formation."—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, author of Yaqui Resistance and Survival
"Like any good work of journeying, The Boundless Sea is only partially about places seen and remembered, and a lot about what is learned, refashioned, and embodied. It is a profoundly personal chronicle of how both academic and lived knowledge come into being."—Matt Matsuda, author of Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures
"Erudite, rigorous, and unsettling, Okihiro's work radically expands and deepens conventional conceptions of space/time, exploring simultaneously the meaning of history and the subject-self. Examined in deep time and intricate space, Eurocentric history and geography such as islands, oceans, and continents transform themselves and attain thus far unimagined dimensions."—Katsunori Yamazato, President and Professor of American Literature, Meio University, Okinawa
336 pp.6 x 8Illus: 11 b/w illustrations
9780520309661$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Oct 2019