The Newest System-Program of Pacific Philosophy (original) (raw)
The Contemporary Emergence of Pacific
2004
Pacific thought is like a dormant volcano: as long as it does not erupt, no one notices it. When it does boil to the surface, it comes, to the many who would rather dismiss it, as an unpleasant reminder of its persistent exis-tence.1 And when it settles again, it is easily forgotten. But we (whether researchers, educators, policymakers, donors, or others) ignore it at our peril. Why should we be concerned about Pacific thought? Answers to this question are partially provided by the literature that has explored facets of national and local philosophies and epistemologies. Over the past thirty-five years or so, Pacific theologians have examined how Samoan, Kiribati, Tuvaluan, Fijian, Tongan, Papua New Guinean, and other Pacific Islander fundamental concepts and philosophies are linked to the gospel and to Christianity in general in order to make the latter more relevant to their societies.2 They have mainly sought to show that, while Christianity can-not survive without integrating ex...
The Quest for a Pacific Theology: A Re-consideration of its Methodology
This paper offers a critique of the Pacific theological enterprise and its foundational principles set forth in the beginning by Dr Sione 'Amanaki Havea of Tonga. In my view, the current shape of Pacific theology and its theological constructs has proven profoundly unhelpful to Pacific people on the grassroots level.
The Journal of Pacific History
I ka Piko, To the Summit: Resistance from the Mountain to the Sea, 2019
This paper focuses on Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in Hawaiʻi, and uses it as a case example for examining articulations of place and space, or how areas can be understood, read, and interpreted to push particular agendas. Furthermore, it comments on the often- conflicting expressions of belonging and possession, how they are enacted and embodied both on and off the mountain, and how they have been used in contemporary discourse regarding the sacred. Finally, it offers insight into how resistance efforts may be grounded and motivated by connections to place.
PA409: Representations of the Pacific
As a gay activist I have always viewed culture as a hard, unmoving, biased, misinterpreted and difficult thing. A structure that holds people back from being their true full selves, a preventative tool to allowing women equal rights, in disallowing gay people from being included in mainstream society. It is managed by a group of men that barked orders to the rest of society and expected silent obedience.
Cultural Studies, 2000
This essay offers a critical genealogy of US imperial dynamics in the Pacific in the context of examining the discursive tactics of APEC and the emerging hegemony of transnational capital in the region. Moving from Honolulu to Taipei and Canberra in focus, it tracks the dynamics of globalization and localization under which Asia-Pacific is being constructed into postcolonial if not post-political identity as a coherent region of teleological belonging. Literary and cultural producers are invoked, to the contrary, in order to wrest Asia/Pacific into critical self-consciousness of regional unevenness, alternative possibility, spatial contestation, and desublimated otherness. Asia/Pacific can thus become the signifier for a cultural studies in which opposition, location, indigeneity, and alternative discursive framings of the region can come into contemporary critical play.
A Complex of Seas: Passages between Pacific Histories
This short historiographic essay, part of a roundtable on the history of Pacific empires, describes three broadly-defined approaches to Pacific history: critical empire histories focusing on the Pacific as a space of European, US and Japanese military, colonial and commercial projection and inter-imperial war; indigenist histories centering on the societies and cultures of Islanders; and connectionist histories seeking to integrate the Pacific into broader regional, ethnic and global narratives. It discusses the strengths and limitations of each framework and makes the case for dialogues and interchanges between them.
30 years of the Pacific and The Pacific Review: long time yet no time
The Pacific Review
This paper is a review of scholarship found in the pages of The Pacific Review over the last 30 years. It does so in three ways: (1) it highlights issues in the theory and practice of the international relations, strategic studies, political culture and political economy of the Asia Pacific region. (2) It looks at change in the region over time by an analysis of the shifting fortunes of the major regional powers, namely Japan, China and Indonesia and the challenges they, and China in particular, post to US regional hegemony. (3) It looks at regional process reflected in the fate and fortunes of the regional integrative project in the key policy domains of trade, finance and the environment. The paper concludes with a reflection on the strains on the regional political and economic orders by the rise in nationalist politics.
The Pacific Past That Is Not One: Problematising Re-Indigenised Pacific Futures
Desires for relevant, locally-determined social futures in the Pacific region are often made contingent upon a view of the colonial past that re-asserts Pacific agency, culture and identity, albeit in an often singular and essentialised form. These views of the Pacific past, understandably perhaps, have emerged in response to a perceived erasure in the dominant colonial historical record of local Pacific institutions, social structures, values, cultures and identities. This chapter rejects historical colonial erasure where it still exists, but also calls for caution in re-thinking familiar contemporary Pacific institutions, such as schooling, using simplistic singular and essentialised views of the Pacific past as a basis. The tensions between historical discourses of reduction and erasure, ‘one-ness’ and ‘nothingness’ and debates about new Pacific futures are illustrated well in the call to re-indigenise Pacific education systems and the accompanying focus on so called Pacific epis...
Talanoa Radio: Exploring the Interface of Development, Culture and Community Radio in the South Pacific, 2014
The first part of this draft chapter discusses ancient Pacific navigation and cultural norms arising from the "vaka" voyages, such as collective identities, the culture of silence, the importance of language, and the permeability of identity performance. The second part of this chapter discusses the place of islands in the Western imagination, how this informed the European colonial eras in the Pacific Islands, and "upside-down decolonization" of the islands in the late 20th Century.