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On 21 March 2017, Associate Professor Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa passed away at the age of forty-eight. News of Teaiwa's death precipitated an extraordinary outpouring of grief unmatched in the Pacific studies community since Epeli Hau'ofa's passing in 2009. Mourners referenced Teaiwa's nurturing interactions with numerous students and colleagues, her innovative program building at Victoria University of Wellington, her inspiring presence at numerous conferences around the globe, her feminist and political activism, her poetry, her Banaban/I-Kiribati/Fiji Islander and African American heritage, and her extraordinary ability to connect and communicate with people of all backgrounds. This volume fe...
How does one describe the Pacific's pasts? The easy confidence historians once had in writing about the region has disappeared in the turmoil surrounding today's politics of representation. Earlier narratives that focused on what happened when are now accused of encouraging myths of progress. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts takes a different course. It acknowledges history's multiplicity and selectivity, its inability to represent the past in its entirety "as it really was" and instead offers points of reference for thinking with and about the region's pasts. It encourages readers to participate in the historical process by constructing alternative histories that draw on the volume's chapters. ...
Women from the Pacific Islands are often perceived by Europeans as passive beauties dancing the hula with a flower in their hair, as docile companions of European or local men or as naive personalities surrounded by an endangered environment. But far from that male Western reception of women's status, which can be found in documentaries, motion pictures as well as travel and adventure literature, women are active and resolute agents who self-confidently shape their societies through their courageous and determined acting in public as well as in their communities. The current volume of Novara - Contributions to Research on the Pacific wants to deliver insights into the lives of women from the Pacific Islands and shows how they deal with shifting gender relations in changing societies. Traditions and adjustment processes to changing living conditions of women and men in Papua New Guinea, Palau and New Zealand present fascinating research fields, which open up the view to new living models apart from Western gender concepts.
Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography, she describes not simply a li...
In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation. Seven main themes emerge: “Creation Stories and Genealogies,” “Ocean and Waterscapes,” “Lan...
This new collection reveals the vitality of the intellectual and creative work of Native women today. The authors examine the avenues that Native American women have chosen for creative, cultural, and political expressions, and discuss the points of convergence between Native American feminisms and other feminisms. Individual contributors articulate their positions around issues such as identity, community, sovereignty, culture, and representation. This engaging volume crystallizes the myriad realities that inform the authors' intellectual work, and clarifies the sources of inspiration for their roles as individuals and indigenous intellectuals, reaffirming their paramount commitment to their communities and Nations. It will be of great value to Native writers as well as instructors and students in Native American studies, women's studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and writing and composition.
For the first time, poetry, short stories, critical and creative essays, chants, and excerpts of plays by Indigenous Micronesian authors have been brought together to form a resounding—and distinctly Micronesian—voice. With over two thousand islands spread across almost three million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, Micronesia and its peoples have too often been rendered invisible and insignificant both in and out of academia. This long-awaited anthology of contemporary indigenous literature will reshape Micronesia’s historical and literary landscape. Presenting over seventy authors and one hundred pieces, Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia features nine of the thirteen basic lan...
This collection of essays and selected poetry responds to an address on Samoan religious culture given by Samoa’s Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Tupuola Tufuga Efi, to the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions. The address challenges some fundamental aspects of and assumptions in modern Samoan indigenous religious culture. The essays and poetry form a carefully woven critique, from within and outside Samoa, of aspects of Samoa’s religious and cultural values.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and traveling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison – we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? Island explores these and other questions and ideas, but is constructed above all from the stories and experiences gathered during a lifetime of island hopping. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.