Tetehnan Chapter Two

I haven't posted anything for quite a while and there's some very good reasons for that. One, which I'll have more info on soon is that I spent the weekend helping my grandfather sell and display his tools at the Micronesian Island Fair at Ipao Beach. The other reason is that I finished up my first full draft of my second chapter for my dissertation.

This chapter focuses on answering two obvious questions for a dissertation tentatively titled "Guam: Where the Production of America's Sovereignty Begins!", and those are, "Why Guam?" and "Why Sovereignty?" This chapter also is meant to discuss my methods for my dissertation, and how I will use Catherine Lutz's article "Empire is in the Details" as a frame for using jokes, off-hand remarks, mistakes, blog comments and anecdotes as evidence for my points on sovereignty.

Two weeks ago I posted the extra, unused, and edited out sections from my first chapter under the post Tiempon Mama'daddyddy yan Mama'dississing. I've decided to continue to tradition with my next chapter draft. I should note that if the following fragments seem incoherent or incomplete, that's the point, either they were false starts for a sentence or for a paragraph or section and were taken out or edited out. Think of this as a really really bad, or really really artist and abstract preview of my eventual dissertation!

In order to make the chaos this tetehnan dissertation a little more presentable, I'll slip in some photos of sunsets.

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The fact of the matter is that Guam could have already been there in the cons

In the world today, colonialism is not supposed to exist. Unequal power relationships such as this should not be attributed to large structural concerns, or grand global designs. They should not be viewed or acted upon as if they are a crisis. Instead they are to be seen as local, trivial, exceptional. For the disciplines of political science and international relations, both the questions I am proposing and the sites I am invoking do have an obscene character. They represent potential breakdowns, failings of the modern project and the dominance of the nation-state form and the limiting notion of sovereignty that props it up.

These sorts of exchan
but that in each instance when

Looking at the formal side of things, a discourse such as “state-like treatment” is very powerful and seems incredibly consistent. But there is a value to investigating what your exceptional status means, and what it means that you aren’t part of the whole, and that you need to be constantly brought in and attached, and what does this enable, that your inclusion is always part of some gesture of benevolence?

But these details can reveal

But rather a relationship where Guam’s inclusion is far more difficult to obtain or ensure.

But rather a relationship that is

The result is that Guam is aluded to a safe, sacure and given place in America, even when it doesn’t have that star on that flag.

This discourse on state-like treatment is meant to encompass and cov

During her visits to Guam in 2007, , Congresswoman Christensen

“In those ethnographic details, analysts can see the costs of empire on human bodies and social worlds, the vulnerabilities of empire to erosion or eviction, and the insights and alternatives that antiempire activists have been working on.”

Lutz,
Congress

Rubin Lake

Lutz, 607
“The dilemmas, contradictions, and vulnerabilities of empire are many, but it is often only in the details that they become visible. With them, the empire looks less invincible, and what David Graeber suggests is the “moral imperative of optimism” becomes intellectually possible as well.”

(which extends not just from governments or military planners, but extends to the very gaze of ordinary people or anti-war activists)
Guam is always mentioned as a territory taken in the Spanish American War in 1898, or a current territo

(one reason for this might be found in another article, the bases one, unneeded, unwanted.)
to the region’s and ideas that Johnson is analyzing,

Guam is never mentioned in any way related to the topic at hand. Guam is always mentioned in a curious, empty, unrelated way.

What we see here is the exceptional status, the amb

The random, but certain Americaness of the island wouldn’t be so clear to you however if you have experienced what a staff member for Guam’s non-voting delegate to the United States’ Congress experienced once, when speaking to a voting member of Congress.

(For instance, Micronesian/Guam soldiers killed in war is an appalling statistic, but this alone doesn’t translate into a meaningful sort of theorization as to the value of Guam vs. dependency upon it. Follow their impact through the structure into the

but simply work to find a place

Find a place for Guam in the existing hierarchy

(I am not interested in proving errors in my dissertations, such a tactic would take the emptiness of Guam as a concrete fact. Instead my tactic is that appearances are not deceiveing, but that they are productive)

What for me banality allows me to address is the very expectations

For my dissertation I want to move beyond these types of interventions and address these very expectations. So rather than accepting this liminal status or invisible status of Guam, go into questions of what this liminal appearance of the island actually enables.

exceptional lives and deaths, soldiering
tracing the impact that these deaths and more importantly these exceptional soldiering bodies have on the structure of
Given the fact that I arranged the panel, it was obviously tailored at least theoretically towards my frame of analysis, but the ultimate goal of the
Looking for a friendly base overseas…
The assumption through which the activists at the film screening reacted to Guam, was bae

It is there, waiting, it is not something which we need to recognize, it is just waiting there for us to militarize it.

A reduction of Guam

To see with compassion and

(figure out how to squeeze in the Julian and MLG section, somewhere around in this above section)
Aguon and Leon Guerrero provide the details of the American empire, but do not capture the role of those details in producing that empire. Kissinger

Methodology

Blog comments? Email. Guam is not as important as you make it seem. That’s just not the way things are. No matter what you would like it to be. You can never survive on your own.

(You have a shitload of work for you and that’s being kind)

(Bring in the quote from the Air Force commander, you are a cup)

These people, although I may loathe their tone and the racism that makes it so invective, they aren’t wrong, they do have common sense on their side, weighting down their words. But that is precisely the value of my centralizing or focusing on Guam.

This is of course to shroud the incursion of America around the world, to hide it as it stretches it fingers to slip into even more countries.
Bringin from UCI paper

The release invited any and everyone to attend report back meeting with the delegation in Berkeley, California.

The delegates discussed the cumulative adverse impacts of US colonization and the current military build-up, highlighting such issues as environmental contamination, Chamorro displacement, alarming cancer rates, and the infrastructural strains expected from the island's unprecedented population boom - which will make the Chamorro people a minority group in our homeland. JOIN US FOR AN EVENING OF CULTURAL PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSION:

In order to explain more, why I still try my best to stray from this sort of intervention, let me introduce the important works that other Chamorros are doing. Which is still very important, but why I am choosing another tactic in this dissertation.

For me however my emphasis is on what that lack of knowledge does, what it hides, what it produces.

one Admiral in the article states “the trailer park of the Pacific,”
What is the productive aspect of that ignorance, that exceptional, ambiguous barrier, that colonial difference (MORE)
On this book which is a gtreatise on the birth of a

But in another way, it is important to take this seriously as to perceive the places where America already is, and has long held colonial relationships or established colonies.

In another way. For Guam

Pragmatically,

This phrase never appears in the text of the article itself, but it nonetheless captures very well the relationship between Guam and the United States, as something which embodies at the same time a wholly forgettable and useless character, something barely American, barely tied to American, yet at the same time a place which is so crucial to America, where we find thousands

Pragmatically: The Rumsfeld doctrine?

In that meeting I attempted to articulate what has become a regular mantra for me,
I was engaged with, by numerous people, but Guam was always
In ano
.
was accurate it was very true, and coming from Guam I know that it is real,
For a place like Guam, one must be prepared to

still didn’t quite understand (change to something else, not an issue of “not understanding”) my point, was to treat

Let’s take for instance the effect that this casual banality of Guam has on some of the less appealing American “isms.” If we look at the strange ways that Guam appears and disappears in the writing of it in relation to the United States and its local or international interventions, we find not just any dot on a map, but a dot for the occasional laundering of American imperialism, militarism and colonialism.

, my intent here is that appearances are not deceiving, but that how Guam appears or seems to not be present, all of these are highly productive.
barely American,

Both of these points are powered by the same pragmatic assumption. That whatever Guam is in relation to what I am trying to prove/propose, it is just not enough. Ti nahong.
It does not some obvious threshold for evidence, illustration, exemplifying

I am loathe to take this position because although I would argue that while Guam has a marginal place in these conversations, it is far from being absent or invisible. In fact, Guam is always mentioned in these texts and discussions.

. It is after all, as Slavoj Zizek notes, that it is within the holes of the symbolic order, the gaps where the subject is allowed enjoyment

The title reifies that doctrine of discovery and sovereign invention. By naturalizing the ability of the United States and the

This excitement of Rumsfeld, discovery

Scanning through the article, which is covering the possible heavy and pervasive militarization of the island, we see

If we look at the representations here. Guam is devoid of pretty much anything

In terms of banality, this sort of relationship is the structural norm, it is the way banality works. The

When Rumsfeld is attributed the following quotes and emotional

(should you have something about how the making visible of Guam allows power to continue? Since Americans take the credit for producing, bringing something into existence, which they already have?)

set of racist, imperial
Guam

(Banality assumes complicity)

(Bring in here, Invisibility assumes that Guam is not there, that it is absent and has to be recognized and made to mean something)

"Rumsfeld is high on Guam; he was heard asking, `How are we going to do Guam?'

What is the productive aspect of that ignorance, that exceptional, ambiguous barrier, that colonial difference (MORE)

The excitement of Rumsfeld. The discovering of Guam.

"Rumsfeld keeps saying, `What about Guam? Let's build up Guam,' " said an American diplomat in Tokyo, where the defense secretary stopped after visiting here.

Of the Pentagon's new appreciation for Guam, Mr. Peterson said: "Rumsfeld is high on Guam; he was heard asking, `How are we going to do Guam?' They are not showing their hand. But through innuendo and comments that we pick up on, everybody is suggesting there is going to be so much going on here."

“vicissitudes on the ground, where people live-

This work, however, is characterized by an astounding lack of attention to the details of those projects, including their gendered and raced quality, and their

The role of details is to disappear as to create a coherent whole. Details tend to define the whole through their absence, their erasure and absorption.

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