Review of David Igler (The Great Ocean) and Paul Gascoigne (Encountering the Pacific). Bulletin of the Pacific Circle (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
Across currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific studies
Atlantic Studies, 2017
Current (geo)political and economic developments, as well as the ongoing transpacific flow of people, ideas, and goods have triggered a surge of interest in the Pacific as a region, an object of academic study, as well as a source of important political, scholarly, and artistic work by Pacific Islanders themselves. Scholarly work in the humanities has been especially marked by the attempt to bring the Pacific region, as well as Pacific studies as a field, into a critical relation with other areas of studysuch as Atlantic, oceanic, and archipelagic studies. This approach offers considerable potential, but also a number of pitfalls. Promoting a conversation between Pacific studies and other fields of research runs the danger of reducing the former to a merely relational existence. Further, there is a risk of repeating Euro-American imperial discourses, which have subjected the Pacific as a region and its inhabitants to various projections and desires ever since James Cook's voyages to and mappings of the Pacific. In contrast, Tongan scholar Epeli Hauʿofa in his powerful essay "Our Sea of Islands" urged for a re-examination of the Pacific, not through the lens of western epistemologies and as an object of colonial desire, but rather as a space in its own right, with its islands and communities continuously shaped and connectednot isolatedby the oceans surrounding them. According to Hauʿofa, Pacific Islander identities are simultaneously characterized and linked by the rootedness of their island homes and the fluidity of the oceans, facilitating a multitude of multidirectional exchanges predating and transcending European migration into the region. 1 His conceptualization of "Oceania" steers attention to myths, legends, narratives, and (oral) traditions of Pacific Islanders as a source for framing Pacific Islander identities, and since its publication has offered an important point of departure for scholarly and political work reconsidering the Pacific on its own terms. Despite the fact that questions of colonialism and empire, dispossession and sovereignty, migration and identity can be regarded as transoceanic phenomena, and historical developments remain entangled across oceans, scholars in Pacific studies have warned that the Pacific and its history are distinct from the Atlantic World and cannot be