Relations, Reciprocity, and Resistance: Asian American Studies Against Tyranny

Our 2026 AAAS gathering in Hawai‘i coincides with a series of anniversaries that present a timely opportunity to consider the promises and limits of Asian American Studies from the belly of the U.S. imperial beast. Here we’re especially thinking about how 2026 marks the semiquincentennial of the United States’ declaration of independence from the British Empire and the birth of its own world historic imperial vision that extended its reach from the Atlantic into the Pacific; the 50th anniversary of the first “landing” that liberated the island of Kaho‘olawe from decades of U.S. Navy live-fire bombing, a Kanaka Maoli-led effort that helped spark the modern sovereignty movement; and the 80th anniversary of the Great Hawai‘i Sugar Strike, an island-wide, interethnic, working-class shutdown of the plantation industry. 

The 2026 AAAS conference in Hawai‘i serves as a space, place, and time through which to collectively reflect on, respond to, and/or reckon with settler colonial and U.S. imperial desires and designs that continue to shape everyday life and futures. This call for collective study should be read as an invitation for critical inquiry into our field and association, particularly as this conference takes place in a site that has been continually marked by the frictions of decolonial struggle. Indeed, the emergence of Asian settler colonial critique contends with how Asian settlers benefit from Kanaka Maoli dispossession, and how our politics must be answerable to Indigenous sovereignty if we are to build a truly radical collective future (Trask, Fujikane and Okamura). How can we attend to the contradictions of our presence in Hawai‘i as an organization in light of Kanaka Maoli calls for consent and reciprocity? How might AAAS in Hawai‘i serve as a touchstone for thinking through the forms of resistance that have brought people and ideas in relation across the islands, to other archipelagoes, and that traverse and bind Asia and the Pacific? In all, how can Asian American Studies, especially in and from Hawai‘i, help us further probe the global and historical processes and enduring legacies and logics of white supremacy and racial capitalism, of war and empire, of militarism and tourism, of land and capital, of labor and racialization, of Asian settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty, of freedom and violence? 

Hawai‘i was and is a key site for the anticolonial racial solidarities and dreams of revolution that menaced empire (Jung). This conference, in this moment and in this place, occasions the opportunity to challenge and interrogate our field, its investments, and its strategies in ways that exceed notions of belonging and citizenship and recognition, and that engage meaningfully with Indigenous sovereignty and coalition building. We invite dispatches and critiques that move against tyranny and its attendant imperial, settler colonial, ecological, carceral, and genocidal effects across the globe (especially in SWANA regions). This is a call that anchors our work to the radical visions and possibilities of sovereignty and solidarity that have shaped life here and across the Pacific. 

As we face and fight tyranny in the United States, we also work toward abolitionist futures, and envision relational, transnational, and transformative justice. We welcome scholars, artists, activists, and other partners in struggle to submit a range of interdisciplinary papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, performances, and demonstrations that grapple with how Asian American Studies as a scholarly field, professional organization, pedagogical praxis, and theoretical/political orientation offers us tools toward a more liberatory collective future.