Locating Guam: the Cartography of the Pacific and Craig Santos Perez’s Remapping of Unincorporated Territory

Abstract

Guam in the Mariana Islands today remains an unincorporated organized territory of the United States of America. Its ongoing colonial history illustrates the role of the Pacific island world in the formation of a European vision of globalization and the continuing hegemonic purchase of this vision in the twenty-first century in what Hillary Clinton has called the ‘Participation Age’. The power of this vision depends in part on its naturalization in a cartographic representation that reduces the world to which Guam belongs to tiny specks in an essentially empty ocean. This essay discusses how Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez's ongoing project from Unincorporated Territory sets out to challenge this hegemony and to relocate Guam in an oceanic worldview that predates and outlasts its instrumentalization in the interests of free trade.