The "Black Pacific" and decolonisation in Melanesia

Performing négritude and indigènitude

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3634845
AutoresCamellia Webb-Gannon (0000-0001-8756-7584, Western Sydney University), Michael Webb (0000-0002-8881-9904, The University of Sydney), G Solis (0000-0002-7667-201X, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Año2018
Volumen127
Número2
Páginas177-206
Fecha de publicación2018-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the Polynesian Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0032-4000 • E-ISSN: 2230-5955
EditorialPolynesian Society (PUBLISHER • NZ)
DOI10.15286/jps.127.2.177-206
OpenAlexW2810824898
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas15

In the 19th century Melanesians were pejoratively labelled black by European maritime explorers (mela = black; nesia = islands). Emerging scholarship on the Black Pacific focuses on historical and contemporary identifications and articulations between Oceanian and African diasporic peoples, cultures and politics based upon shared Otherness to colonial occupiers. This essay contributes to such scholarship by presenting a perspective from Melanesia with a focus on music, a popular form of countercolonial expression. It examines in two broad phases person-to-person and person-to-text encounters with Atlantic-based notions of Black Power and négritude. The Pacific War serves as a dividing line and turning point, during and following which such encounters began to intensify. The discussion links these African diasporic intellectual traditions/discourses/epistemologies with that of indigènitude, that is, performed global expressions of Indigenousness, through allusions to Black transnationalism and the ways both movements address the “inferiority confusion” that arose from experiences of colonisation. It demonstrates how in the last 35 years in particular, Melanesians have worked to invert the demeaning intention of their colonial racial construction and, in the process, have helped to create what may now be thought of as the Black Pacific

Archaeology · Colonialism · Confusion · Decolonization · Ethnology · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · Transnationalism · Anthropology · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Gender Studies · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Psychology