With recent cuts to USAID, climate finance and general pessimism about our road to a positive climate future, this collection looks to provide some food for thought regarding the places and peoples conceived the most frequently as climate victims.
Perhaps despite our geographic and contextual distance from Oceania, the words, creativity, knowledge and action of Pacific peoples can circulate to the Jerwood (where all the greatest minds gather of course!) and unsettle some dominant understandings of these places.
The concept of the 'Blue Continent' is an expression of Pacific Island agency, relevance and empowerment in the face of geographical scales and international imaginings that frequently portray it as, to quote Hau'ofa "the hole in the donut" of the Pacific Rim.
I'm Jack Millar a final year Politics and Anthropology student.
I have curated literature from a variety of disciplines under the heading of 'The Blue Continent', to emphasise, at a most basic level, that the Pacific is a place where things happen, people create, think and live their lives. This contains work that highlights indigenous approaches to climate change, complexities in the decolonial project in academia, Pacific conceptions of modernity and some classic works regarding history and social thought.
I hope you enjoy! Feel free to contact me with any questions at jadm5@cam.ac.uk.
Map of the exclusive economic zones in the Pacific. Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Maps are a crucial technology that we use to imagine space. With space, in turn, comes the comparative imagination of relative scale. Once key political and discursive negotiation that is occurring in contemporary Oceania is that of overcoming 'smallness'.
What happens if we cease to measure land but instead accommodated the ocian? This graphic shows the Blue Continent that emerges if we use EEZ over land mass as our scale.
Indigenous Pacific Approaches to Climate Change by Lyn Carter
Delving deeply into data from her own Māori group, Kai Tahu Iwi, Lyn Carter looks to add to the burgeoning work on the importance of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) in mitigation and adaptation to climate change. It forwards a rehabilitation of knowledge taken as scientific as opposed to indigenous. The creative applications of TEK are argued to be valuable in efforts to handle the social impacts of climate change.
If you are interested in the complications of climate policy, and the particular navigation of the global and local dynamics of climate change then I would recommend this book. Similarly if you are interested in conceptions of scientific knowledge and the social work they do on the ground when they meet with alternative ways of understanding the environment then I recommend it as well! The book is succinct, so I will let you explore the individual chapters that speak to you.
We are the Ocean by Epeli Hau‘ofa
A collection of one of the foremost Pacific Islander thinkers and authors. We are the Ocean is a diverse collection of literature bridging styles and genres- analytic articles, cultural essays, interviews, a short story and two excerpts from a longer fiction.
Epeli Hau‘ofa is a fundamental author in post-colonial Pacific thought, someone who looks to widen the horizon of thought regarding this region. His work and project is taken up by those looking to manifest Oceania through climate justice.
Two favourite works (as a HSPS student) are Our Sea of Islands and The Ocean in Us critical, but creative projects which argue towards overcoming Pacific Island smallness, division and territorial boundaries towards a meaningful engagement with the Ocean as a shared material and thus conceptual legacy with a profound role to play in post-colonial politics and climatic futures.
New Oceania edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long
This edition looks to unsettle the dominant conception of the Pacific Islands as the “antithesis of modernity” in the imagination of Europe. Contesting that Pacific artists and writers have been creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity and modernisms, this book brings together late 20th century work to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars and, on the other side of the coin, the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars.
Chapter 2 - ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania provides a fascinating perspective. I would similarly recommend Chapter 3, concerned with nuclear modernisms, resistance and Pacific women’s literature.
The Rise of Pacific Literature by Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward
Long and Hayward combine again in a continuation of this emphasis on modernism. They attend to the complex academic negotiations between distinct Oceanic modernism or a hybridised Oceanic literature infused with modernism.
The book unpacks a variety of epistemological contestations and projects in pedagogical and publishing contexts and relations. Chapter 3, which focuses on Ulli Beier, is a thought provoking read. Beier in Papua New Guinea dons an indigenous mask, writing under Indigenous pseudonyms.
A powerful figure in the UPNG (University of Papua New Guinea), classes in Tok Pisin and Indigenous language drew life from his work. This influence is obviously complicated and criticised by his practice of masquerading as Indigenous, where the author writes “a disguised hand was shaping form, tastes and responses” (Pg. 94).
Kai Wai- A Fiji Film. Official Trailer. This is my own documentary trailer regarding the environment in Fiji.
Islands of History by Marshall Sahlins
Initially introduced to me in first year when I was conducting ethnographic research under the supervision of Prof Robbins from Trinity, Islands of History is a complex, dense and challenging read (even as a finalist!).
If you dare to enter into its pages, overarched by theoretical axe grinding of a project of structural historical anthropology, you will be rewarded with fascinating folds between mythologies from Europe, histories from America and the Pacific.
Chapter 3, ‘The Stranger-King; or Dumezil among the Fijians’, is a personal favourite
Geographies of Post-Colonialism (2nd edition) by Joanne P. Sharp
This edition, though not explicitly centred on the Pacific, provides a useful overview of the post-colonial geography and discursive power of spatial organisation that is vital for a rethinking of the Pacific Islands as a Blue Continent.
It focuses on many tangential themes and concepts that have referred to the pacific. For example, it highlights the tropics in particular as a more-than-geographical term that encompasses romantic ideas of natural bounty, but similarly laziness and innocence.
It is an easy, clear read, and addresses many key concepts that are increasingly being brought to the fore in conceptions of Oceania and negotiations of political, climatic agency beyond smallness and vulnerability.
