Garvey's Caveat : Pan-Africanism and the Pacific -- Negroids of the Pacific : West Papua, Senegal, and Negritude -- Oodgeroo Noonuccal : Black women's internationalism in Australia -- Black power in Papua New Guinea -- Melanesia's way : Papua New Guinea and the Black Pacific -- Black Pacific festivals : FESTAC, Nigeria, and Oceania -- POVAI : Fiji, Pacific women, and a nuclear free Pacific -- : Black liberation in Kanaky -- One single front against imperialism : Libya, New Caledonia, and Oceania -- Blacks must rule Vanua
Pauulu's Diaspora is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Challenging U.S.-centered views of Black Power, Quito Swan offers a radically broader perspective, showing how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South. Born in Bermuda and with formative experiences in Cuba, Kamarakafego was aware at an early age of the effects of colonialism and the international scope of racism and segregation. After pursuing graduate studies in ecological engineering, he traveled to Africa, where he was inspired by the continent's independence struggles and contributed to various sustainable development movements. Swan explores Kamarakafego's remarkable fusion of political agitation and scientific expertise and traces his emergence as a central coordinator of major black internationalist conferences. Despite government surveillance, Kamarakafego built a network of black organizers that reached from Kenya to the islands of Oceania and included such figures as C. L. R. James, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Kwame Nkrumah, Sonia Sanchez, Sylvia Hill, Malcolm X, Vanessa Griffen, and Stokely Carmichael. In a riveting narrative that runs through Caribbean sugarcane fields, Liberian rubber plantations, and Papua New Guinean rainforests, Pauulu's Diaspora recognizes a global leader who has largely been absent from scholarship. In doing so, it brings to light little-known relationships among Black Power, pan-Africanism, and environmental justice.
Abstract This essay is centered on Fiji's Pacific Women's Conference (PWC) of 1975. It adds to Africana scholarship by demonstrating how Black women's internationalism weaved across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean worlds. Organized by Fijian women such as Amelia Rokotuivuna, Claire Slatter, and Vanessa Griffen, the conference was a unified berth for Pacifica women to address the interlocking regional issues of gender, neocolonialism, ecological justice, human rights, ethnicity, race, culture, and sovereignty. These women helped transform Suva, Fiji, into a hub for Pacifica nationalist movements, such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP). They also attended the United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City (1975). Slatter and Griffen edited NFIP's newsletter, Povai, which became a collective voice for Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian anticolonial struggles. The PWC occurred at a critical moment of Indigenous, Global South women's and anticolonial liberation struggles across the region. Conference participants represented political movements from across New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Tahiti, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas. They denounced French, Australian, American, British, and Indonesian (neo)colonialism and imperialism in the South Pacific. This highlighted the relationships between Oceanic, Asian, African American, Caribbean, and African liberation struggles.
