UC San Diego

When asked about decolonization and the rights to self- determination of the peoples of the Micronesian islands, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger infamously stated, "There are only 90,000 people there; who gives a dam?." It is in this sort of similar dismissive logic that colonialism today in place such as the island of Guam is regarded. As a colony in a world which has already gotten over colonialism, a place such as Guam is a sad exception to the existing multicultural family of nations. In this sense, Guam and places like it are insignificant, and say or mean very little in terms of describing or defining the global order today. They exist to simply be attached to other larger nations, and are defined primarily through powerlessness and dependency. In this dissertation, these relationships and the way they are dominantly articulated today will be challenged and denaturalized. The notions that Guam is an irrelevant effect of the United States, merely a mistake on sovereignty's journey, or a powerless American territory, will be interrogated to reveal their structure. The core of accomplishing this challenge, which amounts to a process of theoretical decolonization, is to re-imagine and re-articulate the meaning of Guam's ambiguous, exceptional status, from one of irrelevance or powerlessness, and reveal the way in which Guam or other sites like it, actually play constitutive roles in producing the powers that claim them. Therefore this dissertation will seek to decolonization the space between Guam and the United States, and Guam and the concept of sovereignty by showing the structure by which Guam potentially sits at the center of American power, and that there are a litany of ways in which its banality, its geography, its coloniality all intersect to constitute the United States, its power, its authority, its might, its sovereignty. Each chapter will represent a different attempt to re-signify that discursive space between Guam and the United States and sovereignty, and to reverse the conventional way in which the space is assumed meaning, and what the tendencies for power and dependency are, or who constitutes who and who is powerful or powerless?