AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

This essay takes place amongst the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the discursive event of the USS Theodore Roosevelt outbreak in March. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine national and local news media’s complicity in the continued colonization and militarization of Guåhan through the centering of U.S. military narratives and methods of erasure, isolation, ambiguity, the dehumanizing of counterhegemonic actors, and the use of “One Guam” rhetoric. I found that the Indigenous people of Guåhan, and their ongoing struggle against the United States for decolonization and demilitarization, were largely absent from national coverage of the event. Simultaneously, local news media used the event to reaffirm existing colonial power structures while obfuscating the island’s status as a colony. This essay seeks to deepen understandings of the ways in which mainstream media reproduce American colonialism, and is imperative for Indigenous activists, political leaders, and organizers seeking to dismantle the interconnected projects of white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalism weighing on marginalized communities in the United States and around the globe.