Tracey Banivanua Mar. Decolonisation and the Pacific

Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire is at the leading edge of an emerging third wave of studies of decolonization in the Pacific. These studies show that frameworks bound to the emergence or continuity of the nation-state are inadequate for accounting for the experiences and agency of Indigenous peoples. The first wave of these studies crested with history’s promise of self-determination in the 1960s, a time that also saw the origin of Pacific history as a field, but the second wave of studies came crashing down as the political and economic exigencies of small Pacific states seemed to have overdetermined their failure. The late Tracey Banivanua Mar had something else in her sights. Decolonizing the history of decolonization in the Pacific, her book charts the emergence of Indigenous identity across the region––including, unusually, in the Anglophone Pacific settler states of Australia and New Zealand––and across time. Despite, and often because of, Indigenous peoples’ historical experiences of displacement and dispossession, Banivanua Mar argues that Pacific Indigenous peoples have created something perhaps more ephemeral than the attainment of secure statehood, but also more meaningful: shared racial consciousness, mutual recognition, and “cultural affirmation” (179).

Agency (philosophy) · Ancient history · Decolonization · Empire · Ethnology · Globalization · Identity (music) · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies