Transnational Subjectivity in the Pacific Ocean

This article shows how ordinary seafolk from the Japanese archipelago known as hyakushō contributed to the creation of a world beyond the international order of nation-states and the global marketplace. These were people of the sea for whom the label ‘Japanese’ citizen, or any other national categorisation, would be historically inaccurate. Focusing on their transnational subjectivity allows us to discern historically distinctive temporal and spatial imaginations. The past and ongoing erasure of such spatio-temporal imaginations play a part in reproducing binary worldviews such as the West-Rest dichotomy. In this article, I propose a way of reconstructing forgotten times and places by examining traces of transnational movements—by describing the late nineteenth century emergence of ‘the Arafura Zone’ in the peripheries of turn-of-the-twentieth century modern empires between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.