Author: Christen T. Sasaki

Christen T. Sasaki is a historian of race, empire, nationalism, and the Pacific Island world, and an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California San Diego. Pacific Confluence studies the struggle over nationhood in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi, especially after the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and before United States annexation. University of California Press published the book in 2022 with the subtitle Fighting over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiʻi, as volume 69 in the American Crossroads series. Sasaki places Native Hawaiian political action alongside the competing ambitions of white American, Japanese, and Portuguese settlers and transients. This wider frame resists treating annexation as inevitable, showing instead how race-based nationalism, sovereignty, and jurisdiction were argued across local and international arenas. Her training in history and Asian American studies supports a transnational method in which intimate encounters and global imperial projects illuminate one another rather than occupying separate scales.