Annie Isabel Fukushima
I
n 1998, Kil Soo Lee, a Korean, opened the Daewoosa garment factory in American Samoa. Lee brought migrant laborers from Vietnam and China to work in the factory. Complaints of trafficking circulated in media net-works as early as 2000. The Daewoosa factory trafficked two hundred workers from Vietnam and China to work alongside approximately fifty Samoan workers in American Samoa. Court records and media coverage of the case illuminated to the public how this employer starved the workers, threatened deportation, restricted the workers’ movement, and even beat them. One wit-ness described the beatings: it was like “watching a film where the people are being brutally beaten to the point of like a massacre” (“Servitude in American Samoa”). In 2001, Lee was charged in Hawaii federal criminal courts on vio-lations including involuntary servitude, extortion, and money laundering.Lee was convicted in 2003 and sentenced in 2005 to forty years in prison.
Narratives like the Daewoosa case shed light on human rights violations and the failures to facilitate human rights in Asia-Pacific. Visible trafficking narratives are bound to facilitate a kind of witnessing in dualities: victim/
criminal, illegal/legal, and citizen/noncitizen. These dualities reify how some subjects are viewed through colonial frames, wherein those who fail to further a narrative of citizenship, legality, and victimhood are socially dead.
In this chapter, I argue that one cannot separate understanding rights in the Pacific from the modern colonial economic condition of settler logics. I will ground this argument by seeking to understand human rights violations circulating from Asia to American Samoa to Hawaii to California on the west coast of the continental United States.
The U.S. presence in the Asia-Pacific region is bound to militarisms and the modern colonial economic system. Plantations in the Pacific grew in the mid-1800s due to the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865)—a war that disrupted the provision of supplies, leading to the establishment of plantations in Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, northern New South Wales, and Queensland (Lal et al.). In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii. During the nineteenth century, Hawaii became a central part of a Pacific trade of goods and people (Rosa 226).
President William McKinley signed the Tripartite Convention (1899) a year after the annexation of Hawaii, placing west Samoa under the U.S. Depart-ment of the Navy. Encompassing the processes of settler colonialism was a legitimization of U.S. presence in the region through civil rights claims, fur-thering an ideal of American democracy (Fujikane and Okamura). Hawai-ians, Kanaka Maoli, were granted citizenship with the United States and, for some indigenous Hawaiian scholars, were seen as “second class native-Americans” (Trask 83). This contrasts with the American Samoan experi-ence, where U.S. law supplants indigenous laws, thereby normalizing U.S.
law above Samoan law in American Samoa. Joanne Barker’s Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination describes the thwarted relations of U.S. protectionism and Samoan identity of fa’asamoa (Samoan language, culture, and way of life) and fa’amatai (Samoan chiefly system). The Treaty of Berlin (1899) div-ided the Archipelago into American Samoa (East) and the independent na-tion of Samoa, and the Tripartite Convenna-tion (1899) placed West Samoa under U.S. military control. The trial of Ipu (1900) reinforced U.S. law over Samoan law when the last sovereign of Manu’a, Tutuila Manu’a Elisala, was forced to sign a deed of cession of Manu’a. U.S. notions of protectionism over American Samoa are deeply defined by a power relationship and colonial difference, where independent Samoans have difficulties entering an Amer-ican Samoa that enacts its own laws, has its own power of taxation, and controls its own borders. The mixing of languages in American Samoa, in-cluding Samoan and American English; the territorial status of American Samoa; and U.S. military presence—all are constant reminders of how col-onial relations shape the Pacific. Not only are U.S. military occupancy and economic presence in the region a part of settler colonialisms; so too are the migrant laborers who come from multiple parts of Asia. Asian migrant la-borer presence in Asia-Pacific is bound to a legacy of labor migration and labor exploitation (i.e., the coolie trade). In the twenty-first century, these labor exploitive flows are often called human trafficking. How a society may come to know who and what counts as the human and the trafficked person discursively circulates in the media and in the law shaping dominant percep-tions of Asian victimhood and criminality. The intervention I make in this chapter is to examine how the circulation of victimhood as human rights discourse (notably in the media and the law) produces a tethered
subjectiv-ity. When I use the term tethered subjectivities, I am referring to the dualities in (self-)perception of migrant identities that discursively and in practice circulate and are reified through the law, social relations, and politics. As I argue in this chapter, such tethered subjectivities cannot be delinked from narratives of settler colonialism.
Human trafficking is legally defined in the United Nations’ Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (2000). Article 3 of the protocol defines human traf-ficking as follows:
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the con-sent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the ploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual ex-ploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
Although slavery is deeply tied to colonial legacies, the coloniality of the present has largely been absent in discussions of human rights and human trafficking. This chapter examines language and content from court docu-ments, explores media representation in the form of press releases and news articles, and draws on secondary sources such as Virginia Lynn Sudbury’s Sweatshops in Paradise: A True Story of Slavery in Modern America to con-ceptualize the subjectivities produced in antitrafficking narratives. An im-portant theoretical intervention of this chapter surrounding human rights is that subjects such as trafficking subjects (i.e., trafficked persons, traffickers, and antitraffickers) are reproduced through a tethered subjectivity—the du-alities by which rights-based subjects are defined, which are reified through a discourse and practice regarding appeals for citizenship. The call for a cit-izenry is deeply bound to notions of who has the right to have rights, natural-izing settler-colonial logics that further a socially dead status of those whose subjectivity is bound to criminality, illegality, and noncitizenship. To witness the dualities to which Asian migrants are bound even in the context of human rights violations in the Pacific and North America is to reconcile the multiple forms of violence that materialize when settler-colonial logics are operationalized as normal, the everyday. Although a tethered subjectivity is bound to (settler) colonialism and global capitalism, this chapter offers a methodology of witnessing an analytical category I have argued elsewhere as having social, political, and material consequence (Fukushima). To witness
beyond dualities requires enactments of new forms of witnessing. Therefore, I draw on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of ritual hacking to witness on the side of those who are oppressed (Lugones) as a decolonial modality of witnessing. I will examine United States v. Kil Soo Lee (2005), EEOC v. Glob-al Horizons, Inc. (2014), and the story of Sonny in CGlob-alifornia. From Samoa to California, these cases collectively construct how tethered subjectivities across contexts produce socially dead subjects who are deeply defined by eventfulness and ongoing modern colonial economic systems. To conclude, I offer an exemplar of witnessing on the side of the oppressed by challenging the very discursive terrain of colonial systems. By tracing various cases from the Pacific to the west coast of the continental United States, this chapter of-fers a practice of witnessing, appealing to readers to contend with the mul-tiple sites and contexts where such modalities of seeing are materialized.