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This is the editors' introduction to Forward, a curated selection of excerpts from important new publications in the field of transnational American studies. For this edition, we have chosen to explore the afterlives of empire and slavery through award-winning works by Jodi Kim, Heidi Kim, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Anita Gonzalez.

Since the mid-19th century, the copra trade has created challenges and opportunities for Pacific Islanders, including Samoans. In the wake of formal annexation in 1900, German colonial officials tried repeatedly to force Samoans to work on foreign plantations for wages. In this article, I argue that Samoans resisted these demands in two major ways. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of Samoans continued subsistence agriculture that offered greater control over their lives. On the other hand, Samoans selectively adapted to new economic circumstances. Occasionally, Samoans engaged in wage labour on Euro-American plantations to earn the cash needed for imported goods, government taxes and church donations. To circumvent the monopolistic practices of Euro-American traders, Samoans also founded copra cooperatives. These ultimately folded under coercion, but not without creating a crucial legacy for future anti-colonial resistance. In Samoa's world of copra, sweetness and colonial power were tightly bound together.

This article examines the linguistic and cultural tensions in global Hip Hop culture through an analysis of the performance of Gsann, an emcee from the Tanzanian Hip Hop crew X Plastaz, at the 2009 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta. Gsann's rhymes in Swahili, his emphasis on religion, and his global travels distinguished him from his African American colleagues in the cipha. At the same time, the decision by the BET producers to translate Gsann's Swahili rhymes into English has to be seen within the longer history of cultural and linguistic politics in Tanzania and the United States. Thrown into the primetime spectacle of the BET Awards, Gsann's African roots became quickly incorporated into American Hip Hop culture, dominated by African Americans. As this case study of an artist from Tanzania shows, Hip Hop's global journey has brought together artists from around the world without eliding their cultural and linguistic differences.

Abstract This chapter explores the making of the colonial state in Samoa in the 1890s. The Samoan case offers new insights into the workings of the colonial state precisely because nowhere else were Euro-American colonial projects as intertwined with and dependent on local support. In an unprecedented experiment in colonial rule, German, British, and American officials shared control over the Samoan islands from 1889 to 1899. This so-called tridominium, I argue, served as a colonial strategy of deferral for Euro-American officials anxious to diffuse escalating conflict over the distant islands. Contrary to plan, ongoing tensions among German, British, and American interests allowed Samoans to maintain considerable political and economic autonomy. The main reason for the ultimate failure of the tridominium for Euro-American policy-makers lay in the uneven and incomplete exercise of colonial power over Samoans. Limitations in geography, people, and finance made the tridominium a weak colonial state. In addition, the lack of resources the respective metropolitan governments devoted to the distant archipelago in the South Pacific increased the relative influence of Samoan leaders and of the growing number of Samoans who joined the administration. Samoa in the 1890s serves as an important reminder that colonial rule was rarely clear-cut and never complete.

The end of the Second World War did not spell the end of the science of race, neither in Europe nor in the USA. In many ways a crucial juncture of the twentieth century, 1945 is a less useful marker with regard to the demise of racial science on both sides of the Atlantic. After the Second World War, scientists interested in the biological foundations of human difference continued to exchange their research findings, communicated through letters, and met at conferences hosted by older and newly founded scientific organizations. Spun by racial scientists since the nineteenth century, the transatlantic web

On 18 October 1910, the Sokehs had had enough. Fed up with harsh work conditions and regular violence, two hundred workers on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei took up clubs and rifles to fight against their German overseers. The outraged workers set their bosses running and managed to kill the new German district chief who had contributed to the escalating conflict. It was only with a heavily armed navy intervention with over 700 men that the ‘Sokeh Rebellion’, as it became known, was finally suppressed in January 1911. Overall, almost a dozen Sokehs died in combat (fifteen more were later

My dissertation follows the lives and struggles of the workers of Samoa from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from travel reports and court depositions to photographs and maps—my dissertation reconstructs the experiences of Samoans as well as migrants from Melanesia, Micronesia, and China. This diverse group of peoples living in Samoa harnessed their own energy and that of their natural environment to create a colonial world often beyond their own control. At the same time, they succeeded in re-creating their own lifeworlds in ways that often defied the limits of this colonial world. I argue that community, conflict, and resistance among workers in colonial Samoa can best be understood by delving deeply into the particular dynamics of particular workscapes. Five workscapes—the subsistence economy, the plantation, the ethnographic show, the building of infrastructure, and the colonial service—became crucibles of lived sociality and, over time, political solidarity for the people living and laboring in colonial Samoa. As much as German, American, and New Zealand colonial officials tried to keep workers apart from one another, they succeeded in overcoming racial and colonial boundaries and formed new kinds of community.

Book review. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.