Ryan Buyco
Assistant Professor, Ph.D. Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture
Pronouns: he/him/his
Areas of Interest
- Oceanic Filipinx Studies
- Asian Settler Colonial Critique
- Travel Writing
- US Militarism in the Pacific
Contact Information
- Office: Bldg. 38, Rm. 145
- Phone: 805-756-1766
- Email: rbuyco@calpoly.edu
About Ryan Buyco
Ryan Buyco is a travel writer and an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. He holds graduate degrees from Cornell University (PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture) and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (MA in Asian Studies). Ryan’s work focuses on travel writing as a decolonial practice, especially as it is informed by Filipinx engagements with settler colonialism and Indigeneity in the Pacific. This work has taken him across the ocean, to Okinawa, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines, where he continues to learn how shared histories of colonization connect many islands in the Pacific together.
Ryan is currently working on two major projects. The first is Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, which blends modern travelogue with a reflection of Asian settler colonial critique in what is often referred to as “Japan’s Hawai‘i.” In this book, Ryan guides readers through his own detours across the militarized and touristic space of Okinawa to consider how legacies of US empire and Japanese imperialism shapes the relationship that Filipinos have to this place. His second project, The Weight of Culture: A Panakayon of Stone, Sea, and Spirit (advanced contract with Vibal Publishing House in Manila, Philippines), shares his panakayon—an Ilonggo word that means, “journey”—of learning the ancestral sport of Polynesian rock lifting in order to reflect on what it might mean to be Filipino in Oceania today.
In addition to these projects, Ryan is one of the core organizers of the recently formed Filipinx Travel Writers Collective, a group dedicated to fostering critical dialogue about the genre among Filipino writers. His work has been supported by the Consortium of Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, among others. For his current CV, please see here.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming, “Islands of Thought: Oceanic Filipinx Studies from Morro Bay to Okinawa,” Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diaspora Studies
“‘Finding New Routes’: Visualizing an Oceanic Okinawa in Laura Kina’s Holding On (2019),” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 9, no. 1, 2023.
“Davao Pilgrimage by Sakiyama Asao (with Translator’s Introduction).” Translated from Japanese. Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, special issue on “Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Island Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies,” vol. 7, no. 2, 2021: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/ces-0702
“pacific thoughts.” 2021. positionspolitics.org. https://positionspolitics.org/pacific-thoughts/
“Afterlives of the Okinawan Community in Davao, Mindanao: Sakiyama Asao’s ‘Davao Pilgrimage’ (1997).” The International Journal of Okinawan Studies, vol. 8, 2017, pp. 27-41.