Description
Book SynopsisExplores intersections of environment, identity, empire, and memory in Kwajalein Atoll. Approaching the multiple atollscapes of Kwajalein's past and present as ancestral land, colonial outpost, battlefield, weapons-testing base, and home, Dvorak delves into personal narratives and collective mythologies from contradictory vantage points.
Trade ReviewThere is good argument for careful analyses of global "hotspots" as exemplar places that disclose larger political, economic, military, and popular culture connections and Kwajalein Atoll is certainly one of these places. Clearly and evocatively, Dvorak deploys key metaphors of "coral" and "concrete" to represent historical accretions on the atoll, and also to symbolize his interest in smaller personal, and larger global stories. Dvorak has a unique perspective on this global hot spot, both as a "Kwaj kid" who grew up on the atoll, calling it home, and as a cross-cultural historian equally comfortable with Marshallese, Japanese, and US viewpoints. Employing metaphors of coral and concrete as contesting accretions on the atoll, Dvorak explores tensions between "little stories" of people and "big stories" of global politics, demonstrating how the constantly invading concrete has buried the past. Coral and Concrete is the first major scholarship to study a single atoll in the Marshall Islands over time and to consider the cumulative impacts of Japanese and American colonialism alongside consistent and active Marshallese resistance to the settlers who sidelined the Marshallese on their own land. . . . [The book] is beautifully researched and poetic in style as Dvorak unfolds the multiple layers of Kwajalein across time and space. Using coral as a "metaphor of deep time," Dvorak creates a space for readers, like the coral, "to break the surface of the water and make islet after islet, connected by reef, to form atolls" of new understandings and possibilities. This is a remarkable book. . . . Coral is a metaphor for the layering of ancestral knowledge accumulated through time as the foundational, life-sustaining core of the atoll; it speaks to the migration, inter-connectedness, and multilayered histories linking the deeper past with the present. Concrete represents the layers of imperial, colonial, and capitalist forces that have pulverized and paved over the atoll's coral formations and the histories that made them. Here then is an apt, environmentally specific approach through which to study the complex interaction of natives and strangers.
