Suchergebnisse

The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are 'we' in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have been portrayed as the most vulnerable to the disastrous consequences of climate change. This focuses on sea level rise and the toxic mixing, the elemental confusion of salt and fresh water caused by atmospheric changes and global warming. While not negating the gravity of present and future scenarios, how can we move beyond the pervasive fatalism of foreign framings and seemingly opposed clichéd evocations of 'resilience'? The moniker of the Pacific Climate Warriors 350.org 'We are not drowning, we are fighting' evokes a contrary trope of resistance and resonates with Oceanic activism in politics and the creative arts.[i] Tracing such a genealogy of resistance might start with a greater respect for Indigenous knowledges and embodied practices in contemporary understandings of 'climate cultures' in Oceania which do not routinely distinguish between natural and human history.[ii]

In this paper I reflect on the aesthetics and cultural politics of Oceanic collections in diverse places, considering objects as "moving" in three dimensions; in the physical sense, in the affective response they elicit, and in the objects or purposes of

This paper considers how far past ideologies of race and of racial and cultural mixing are haunting the present in Oceania. It compares colonial histories and contemporary politics in two Pacific archipelagoes, Vanuatu, an independent state since 1980 and Hawai'i, a state of the US since 1959. In Vanuatu indigenous people are a dominant majority and land is still held primarily through customary custodianship (despite pressure for privatisation) while in Hawai'i indigenous people are a declining minority and were dispossessed of most of their land in the mid-nineteenth century. In both places Western ideologies of race have had to confront more generous conceptions of the relations between persons and places as constructed by indigenous genealogies. But the ghosts of racial ideology and past colonial obsessions with racial and cultural purity and mixing are still alive in both countries.

Past studies of Oceanic masculinities have tended to see masculinity in the singular, through the lens of unchanging cultural traditions, wherein types of men were iconic of cultural differences. This special issue considers masculinities in the plural, both within and between cultures, exploring the relations between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities and how masculinities are configured in the context of colonial histories, militarism, and globalization. It connects a historical and relational approach to masculinities to embodied experience and individual and collective memories across the diversity of Oceania.

This paper situates the fraught relation of nationalisms and feminisms in the context of wider debates about globalization in the Pacific. Through a reading of the poetry and prose of the late Grace Mera Molisa of Vanuatu and Haunani-Kay Trask of Hawai'i, it raises questions about what might be considered "indigenous" and "foreign" in their different locations. Over several decades of intensive and reflective political practice, their respective positions on the relation between nationalisms and feminisms took divergent trajectories. Yet their corpus of poetry, written primarily in English, raises similar questions about what has been described by Wilson and Hereniko as the "inside-out" cultural politics of the contemporary Pacific.

This paper starts with a playful interrogation of being "on the edge" of California from the perspective of a millennial experience "in the center" of Australia - partly to suggest my own location, but also to suggest how imagined geographies of edges and centers, of peripheries and interiors are geopolitical mirages. It then moves to a consideration of how representations of deep time, in being "on the edge" or inhabiting "a sea of islands" relate to the contemporary politics of indigeneity and diaspora in the Pacific. While acknowledging the differences between Islanders of different regions and countries, the co-presence of the values of "roots" and "routes" is stressed. The varied relation of indigeneity and diaspora is explored through visual arts displayed in museums and cultural festivals in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia.

The debate about braed praes as either gift or commodity has a long and complex genealogy in foreign writings on Oceania, engaging anthropologists, Christian missionaries, policy-makers, and feminists. Debates between ni-Vanuatu have been equally protracted, passionate, and complicated, creating an echo chamber of resounding conversations. Such debates and political contests about bride price address deep questions about the value of a woman – as a person, a worker, sexual partner, and mother – and engage profound philosophical questions about the local traction of imported distinctions between subjects and objects, persons and things, and how indigenous categories have been transformed by the longue durée of Christian conversions and simultaneous processes of commoditisation, complicit and conflictual. How have these transformed the 'value' of woman as bride and the character and significance of braed praes? Can the entrenched binaries in such debates be eclipsed by seeing braed praes as both gift and commodity? ; Warm thanks go to all involved in the discussion in our Reading and Writing Group of the Laureate Project Engendering Persons, Transforming Things: Christianities, Commodities and Individualism in Oceania (FL100100196) and to the Australian Research Council for generous funding.

In this paper I reflect on the aesthetics and cultural politics of Oceanic collections in diverse places, considering objects as "moving" in three dimensions; in the physical sense, in the affective response they elicit, and in the objects or purposes of

This paper situates the fraught relation of nationalisms and feminisms in the context of wider debates about globalization in the Pacific. Through a reading of the poetry and prose of the late Grace Mera Molisa of Vanuatu and Haunani-Kay Trask of Hawai'i, it raises questions about what might be considered "indigenous" and "foreign" in their different locations. Over several decades of intensive and reflective political practice, their respective positions on the relation between nationalisms and feminisms took divergent trajectories. Yet their corpus of poetry, written primarily in English, raises similar questions about what has been described by Wilson and Hereniko as the "inside-out" cultural politics of the contemporary Pacific.

This paper starts with a playful interrogation of being "on the edge" of California from the perspective of a millennial experience "in the center" of Australia - partly to suggest my own location, but also to suggest how imagined geographies of edges and centers, of peripheries and interiors are geopolitical mirages. It then moves to a consideration of how representations of deep time, in being "on the edge" or inhabiting "a sea of islands" relate to the contemporary politics of indigeneity and diaspora in the Pacific. While acknowledging the differences between Islanders of different regions and countries, the co-presence of the values of "roots" and "routes" is stressed. The varied relation of indigeneity and diaspora is explored through visual arts displayed in museums and cultural festivals in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia.

The debate about braed praes as either gift or commodity has a long and complex genealogy in foreign writings on Oceania, engaging anthropologists, Christian missionaries, policy-makers, and feminists. Debates between ni-Vanuatu have been equally protracted, passionate, and complicated, creating an echo chamber of resounding conversations. Such debates and political contests about bride price address deep questions about the value of a woman – as a person, a worker, sexual partner, and mother – and engage profound philosophical questions about the local traction of imported distinctions between subjects and objects, persons and things, and how indigenous categories have been transformed by the longue durée of Christian conversions and simultaneous processes of commoditisation, complicit and conflictual. How have these transformed the 'value' of woman as bride and the character and significance of braed praes? Can the entrenched binaries in such debates be eclipsed by seeing braed praes as both gift and commodity? ; Warm thanks go to all involved in the discussion in our Reading and Writing Group of the Laureate Project Engendering Persons, Transforming Things: Christianities, Commodities and Individualism in Oceania (FL100100196) and to the Australian Research Council for generous funding.