Lessons From the Peripheries
Coloniality, Belonging, and Resistance Among U.S. Territorial Peoples
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16667681 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sione Lynn Pili Lister (0000-0002-5774-4110, Arizona State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-13 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Forum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0884-8971 • E-ISSN: 1573-7861 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/socf.70070 |
| OpenAlex | W7154086000 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 45 |
The US territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guåhan, and American Sāmoa—remain permanently subordinated under US rule. Governed through legal frameworks of unincorporation, these places are denied full sovereignty while granted limited mobility and partial political recognition. Territorial migrants occupy distinct social, political, and legal positions that often set their experiences apart from their larger panethnic migrant communities, yet their experiences remain underexamined in US sociology. This article draws on interviews with Sāmoans, Puerto Ricans, and Virgin Islanders to examine how colonial legacies shape citizen‐subject belonging and everyday life. I explore how participants navigate structural neglect, legal ambiguity, and cultural displacement, and how they cultivate practices of care, refusal, and political engagement in response. Together, their accounts illuminate how people living at the periphery imagine and enact alternative futures both beyond and within the nation‐state
Biopower · Colonialism · Commodification · Futures contract · Pacific islanders · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sovereignty · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs
Designs for the Pluriverse
Decolonizing Feminism
The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire
Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity
The Transit of Empire
Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities
Pipelines, protectors, and settler colonialism
Bad Feelings
It hurts but it’s the thing we have to do”
Neither citizen nor alien’
Theorizing the US Racial State
Everyday Decolonization
Shadow care infrastructures
The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”
Operating in the margins”
Compact colonialism
Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America
Patterns of Empire
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
There is an alternative
Settler colonialism as eco-social structure and the production of colonial ecological violence
Legal Pluralism
Relational Colonialisms and a Turn to Place Based Epistemologies
Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance
Care and affective relations
Not coming out as affective care
La descolonización no es una metáfora
Settler Colonialism as Structure
As We Have Always Done
Learning from the Outsider Within
Ethnographic toolkit
The Structural Sources of Ambiguity in the Modern State
Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality
On the Coloniality of Being
Racial comparisons, relational racisms
| Highly cited | No |
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