Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings,Performances and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji

Spatial belonging and ethnic identity among the Banabans resettled on Rabi Island in Fiji are the product of historically and culturally specific articulations and transformations. Such reconfigurations of place and ethnicity, based mainly on enmeshments between the Banabans' new island home, Rabi, and their island of origin in the Central Pacific, Banaba, have let them position themselves as an autonomous community living out a diaspora existence. Central to this identity politics of positioning are ethnic performances in which neo‐traditional enactments are deployed to produce embodied knowledge of Banaban existence and to communicate such knowledge to a wider world. We argue that the Banabans of Fiji, caught in a post‐colonial environment of ethnic‐nationalist discourses and practices, make strategic use of such ethnic performances to affirm and advance, both internally and externally, their own politics of spatial and ethnic positioning on Rabi.     

Emotions and the Relevance of the Past: Historicity and Ethnicity Among the Banabans of Fiji

This article treats the ability emotions have to point up the relevance of past events and so structure consciousness of history. It shows how knowledge of the past is embodied via the agency of emotions. The case study looks at how history is given emotional expression among the Banabans, a group stemming from Banaba Island in central Oceania and later resettled in Fiji. Under the hegemony of Western “regimes of historicity”, the Banabans created a new specific consciousness of history, transforming in the process themselves and their relationships with others. By analyzing several of the channels (oral, artistic, performative) via which Banabans vent their history, the article shows how they articulate knowledge of the past—underscored as relevant by emotions—with awareness of their ethnicity in the past and present. It is argued that emotions are involved in forming historicity, a process that is marked, not least, by reciprocity.     

Historical Cross-Border Relocations in the Pacific: Lessons for Planned Relocations in the Context of Climate Change

ABSTRACT

Perennial discussions arise about relocating whole Pacific Island communities because of the impacts of climate change. The relocation of Pacific communities to other countries is generally assumed to be a novel, futuristic idea. Yet in the mid-20th century, three such cross-border movements in the Pacific occurred, with at least another three mooted but not carried out. This paper focuses principally on the 1945 Banaban relocation from present-day Kiribati to Fiji but makes some comparisons with the movement of Vaitupuans from Tuvalu to Fiji in 1947. Research draws on interviews conducted in Fiji and Kiribati in 2012 and 2013; official records housed in the national archives of Kiribati, Fiji and the UK; and the colonial records of the Western Pacific High Commission, held in New Zealand.     

Tokelau 1852 Exodus

The images of Fiji (and the Pacific generally) that were both employed and consumed at the international exhibitions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries — together with the stereotypes associated with such representations — exhibited a continuity that can be traced back to earlier accounts and displays of Pacific Island peoples. While attempts were made at later exhibitions to shift the focus of displays away from tales of ‘savagery’ and ‘cannibalism’ to those of ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ and even ‘modernity’, the apparent popularity of Fiji's displays — as evidenced in contemporary accounts — remained firmly located in the appeal of the already existing ‘idea’ of Fiji. This article focuses on the representation of Fiji at two British imperial exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, and the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, and demonstrates that the ‘idea’ or ‘knowledge’ of Fiji that audiences brought to the exhibitions, and despite the best efforts of display organisers — usually representatives of the colonial administration — to reposition Fiji within the minds of the metropolitan audience, visitors — as always — saw what they wanted to and in so doing reconfirmed their ‘knowledge’ of Fiji.     

The south pacific ‘experiment’: Reflections on the origins of regional identity

Abstract

When colonial administrators decided to encourage a sense of unity among the members of the emergent élite of their Pacific Island territories in the late 1940s, they regarded their project as novel. Rather than a sense of tapping a pre‐existing affinity, it seemed that what was being attempted was social engineering on a grand scale. The first South Pacific Conference of Pacific Island representatives held at Nasinu, Fiji, in April‐May 1950, was seen by European officials and observers as an ‘experiment’.

The attempt to forge a sense of regional unity was seen as pushing against the perceived gulf between Melanesian and Polynesian cultures and as expecting too much in the way of conference skills from ‘undeveloped’ societies. But the ‘experiment’ was considered necessary for other important post‐war goals. Although the Nasinu conference is to be seen broadly as an experiment in the promotion of trusteeship, or ‘native welfare’, principles, there was by no means agreement on its ultimate purposes. For some it offered the best (if risky) chance of minimising United Nations interference in the continuation of colonial control, for others a way of ensuring the demise of empire by serving the needs of self‐determination. Finally, the promotion of a sense of region among Pacific Islanders was seen by some as part of an experiment in keeping the region from Communist influence.     

Much Lost,Little Gained? Contemporary Trade Agreements in the Pacific Islands

At the close of the 20th century, it was increasingly clear that Pacific Island countries would struggle to remain competitive in international commodity and merchandise trade. As governments worldwide embraced free trade, many Island exporters looked set to be displaced by more efficient producers elsewhere. Island policymakers also faced pressure from more powerful states to renegotiate trading arrangements to bring them into alignment with the rules of the World Trade Organization. This article explains how Pacific Island countries responded to the overlapping challenges of globalization. It considers strategies pursued by Island states in negotiations with the European Union (EU), and with Australia and New Zealand. In both cases, Pacific Islands pressed for agreements that would take account of their unique trading circumstances, and arrangements that would allow more Pacific Islanders to work abroad. After nearly two decades of talks, however, final results proved disappointing. A proposed regional Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU was essentially abandoned, and a regional trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand was concluded without the signature of Fiji or Papua New Guinea – the two largest Pacific Island economies. Ultimately, contemporary trade agreements in the Pacific achieved little to ameliorate the competitive disadvantages Pacific Island states face participating in international trade.     

Tales of Two Fijis: early 1960s Japanese travel writing by Kanetaka Kaoru and Kita Morio

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses impressions of Fiji in 1961, recorded by two well-known Japanese travel writers: travel journalist Kanetaka Kaoru and writer Kita Morio. Their comments on ethnic Fijians' attitudes to work and on encounters with a variety of Indigenous Fijians, including ratu (hereditary chiefs), made the observed people ‘others' informing the travellers' views on post-war colonial Fiji in an era when little was known about Fiji in Japan. Differing views on colonialism underpinned the two authors' views. At the time, Kita and Kanetaka revised but replicated the assumptions of pre-war Japanese writing about Nanyō (the South Seas) and of Western travelogues on the Pacific Islands. While Kita passed blunt and prejudiced judgements, he demonstrated an awareness of colonialism's adverse effects and of concerns also felt by the colonial administration about the place of Indigenous Fijians in the modern world. Kanetaka, seemingly without awareness of her latent prejudice, praised Fiji as a near-perfect colony that benefitted from colonialism.     

Adventures in happy land

Abstract

Interpretation proved to be a key to the successful outcome of three overseas aid projects in Asia and the Pacific. In Vanuatu, interpretation games were used to interest and involve local villagers in writing a management plan to protected a recently protected Pacific Kauri (Agathis macrophylla.) forest. The rapid establishment of national parks in Indonesia required staff to be trained in a variety of disciplines including interpretation. Park interpretation manuals were also written. Small scale tourism ventures in Fiji, where locals are the interpreters, are part of a management plan to protect a private forest park forest from logging.     

Jean Charlot and Classical Hawaiian Culture

A small group of Japanese civilian internees from the South Pacific were confined in New Zealand during World War II, with some being subsequently transferred to Australia in readiness for planned civilian exchanges with Japan. Most from Tonga had Japanese wives and children who were also detained in New Zealand. With one exception, all Japanese who had local wives and families were forced to leave them behind in either Tonga or Fiji. These families proved an anomaly to the Fijian authorities who had to provide care for some, even non-Fijians. In defining who was supported in their former island homes and who was ultimately deported to Japan or allowed to return to the islands, racial attitudes of the various administrations emerge, reflecting an antipathy towards Asians not found in regard to other enemy aliens of the time. New Zealand played the role of honest broker but it, too, did not offer any permanent home to displaced Japanese civilians after the war ended, and supported the expulsion of them from the South Pacific.     

POST-COLONIZATION INTERACTION BETWEEN VANUATU AND FIJI RECONSIDERED: THE RE-ANALYSIS OF OBSIDIAN FROM LAKEBA ISLAND, FIJI*

PIXE–PIGME analysis of 19 obsidian artefacts from Lakeba Island in east Fiji identified contact with northern Vanuatu in the post-colonization period ( c. 2500–1000 bp ) of Fiji. The Lakeba obsidian is the only physical evidence for interaction across the 850 km water gap separating the archipelagos of Vanuatu and Fiji in the first millennium ad . New research on the Vanuatu obsidian sources with laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (LA–ICP–MS) casts serious doubt on the validity of a long-distance inter-archipelago connection in the post-Lapita era. This paper presents the re-analysis of 18 obsidian artefacts from Lakeba using LA–ICP–MS and radiogenic isotope results that demonstrate that the Lakeba obsidian is not from Vanuatu, and it most likely derives from the Fiji–Tonga region. Geochemical evidence for long-distance interaction and migration between the West and Central Pacific in the post-Lapita era has yet to be identified.     

David Meetom: Interpreting,Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

David Meetom, a Duala subchief, was an important interpreter in the coastal region of Cameroon at the beginning of German rule, which was shaped by colonial officials’ lack of language skills, the colonial state’s low level of institutionalisation, its necessity to rely on intermediaries, and tensions within Duala society. In this circumstances, new opportunities opened up to those who had knowledge of a colonial language. The article examines Meetom’s actions as an interpreter, broker and intermediary between colonial and African languages, authorities and interests. It covers his actions from his informal participation in negotiations between African and German authorities, to his work as official government interpreter, to a trial in which he was accused of having exceeded his authority before finally being shot fleeing German authorities. For Meetom, the consequences of his intermediary position veered between being personally advantageous and disadvantageous. His work held potential for conflict, both with the colonial government and with the Duala or other African groups in the region. Meetom’s life serves to illustrate how interpreters facilitated and controlled contact between colonisers and Africans and proves the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised which underlay the concept of colonial rule as having been surprisingly fragile.     

The Story of Jimmy: the Practice of History on North Pentecost,Vanuatu1

The Story of Jimmy is a frequently told oral‐historical account of ‘first contact’ from North Pentecost, Vanuatu. It describes the adventures of a group of ni‐Vanuatu plantation labourers who escape from Fiji by hijacking a ship and navigate a return to their home islands in Vanuatu. Central to the story is a young white man, known simply as Jimmy. Unwittingly forced to make the journey with them, and before they are all finally shipwrecked on the east coast of North Pentecost, Jimmy witnesses the murder and cannibalisation of his father by the starving hijackers. Yet upon departing for home some four years later he bestows a new name upon the Island: Uretabe, the ‘world of love/gifts’. This story, with its dual‐inverted narrative of abduction, transformation, escape and return, presents a remarkable account at a unique moment of historical rupture and cross‐cultural exchange. In doing so it also expresses idiomatic themes of mobility, place and identity as they relate to the politics of both the colonial past and postcolonial present in North Pentecost. This paper explores those themes and narratives while considering their relevance to my own experiences as a researcher in the area.     

The militarization of islands and migration: Tracing human mobility through US bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific

In this paper, we argue that the confinement of people on island military bases, whether narrated as humanitarian rescue, migration management, refugee resettlement, or militarized border enforcement, is an imperial process of ruination that impairs human possibility and erodes access to rights. Furthermore, the government's categorization of mobile people – as refugees, displaced, detainees, or migrants – informs the naming of these spaces, the bureaucratic and legal processes that they are subjected to, and their treatment (by local communities, federal authorities, the media, and the law). Empirical material is drawn from qualitative research conducted on US migration control in the Caribbean and Pacific. We identify spatial patterns of militarization operating across these sites, wherein migration is intertwined with enforcement, confinement, and militarization.     

Rural Women,Displacement and the Three Gorges Project

Based on empirical research, this article examines the status, situations and development issues of rural women displaced by the monumental Three Gorges Project (TGP) in China. The study reveals that TGP resettlement is leaving women worse off as family members, as well as worse off than male members. Woman resettlers are more likely to become impoverished than men, partly because women make up the main labour force in agricultural sectors. Most women are unable to achieve occupational mobility in the process of resettlement. Fewer employment opportunities, a gender‐segregated labour market, low level of human capital and social prejudice are principal causes. Land provision for resettlers is inadequate with a lower quality of productivity. Marriage is a means for some women to remain in or move to the reservoir area to improve their socio‐economic status, but bias against granting of ‘resettler’ status to married women and their generally low levels of education and lack of occupational skills work against them. It is imperative that the authorities integrate a gender perspective into policy‐making and design of resettlement schemes.     

Searching for the Land of the Golden Cocoa-Nut: Australian Travel Writing about Commercial Enterprise in the Pacific Islands

Pacific Island trade and commerce was a prominent theme in travel writing produced within Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This reflected the long history of European commercial exchange between the Australian continent and the Pacific Islands, and a European literary legacy that idealised the region’s economic potential. This article explores popular perceptions of commercial enterprise in the Pacific Islands as expressed in travel writing, focusing on authors with a significant connection, by birth or affiliation, to either the Australian colonies or the Australian nation. The formation of a distinctively ‘Australian’ vision of the Pacific that evolved since European exploration is traced. The voice that took shape in literary form in the Australian colonies during the late 19th century contributed to a national narrative in the early 20th century that imagined the Pacific Islands as a region for Australian investment, profit and colonial enterprise.     

The Governor's vale levu: Architecture and Hybridity at Nasova House, Levuka, Fiji Islands

As an integral component of colonial culture, colonial architecture provides a tangible expression of western presence and domination throughout various colonial settings. In tropical colonies, such as Fiji, western architecture was not simply transplanted, but became transformed through the conscious integration of western and nonwestern architectural elements and grammars. Thus hybrid colonial architecture played a significant role within the sociopolitical strategies of both colonizer and colonized elites. Nasova House, the main government building of the autonomous Cakobau polity (1873–74) and British colonial regime (1874–82), provides a unique example of the use of colonial hybrid architecture in late nineteenth century Fiji.     

Geographical Influences on Settlement-Location Choices by Initial Colonizers: a Case Study of the Fiji Islands

From 3200 to 2850 cal BP (1250–900 BCE), the Lapita people of the Bismarck Archipelago (Papua New Guinea) undertook voyages eastward that led to their colonization of the eastern outer Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The earliest (Lapita) settlements in Fiji were along the Rove Peninsula in southwest Viti Levu Island. At the time of colonization, sea level was 1.5 m higher than today. The Rove Peninsula was then a smaller island off the coast of larger Viti Levu, with a broad, fringing reef along its windward coasts, which was probably the main attraction for Lapita colonizers. As elsewhere during Lapita times in the western tropical Pacific Islands, settlement choice for the initial colonizers of the Fiji Islands was at one level driven by site access, at another by the presence of broad, fringing coral reefs suitable for marine foraging. The earliest settlement along the Rove Peninsula was at Bourewa, occupied first in 3050 cal BP (1100 BCE), where people lived in houses on stilt platforms built along the axis of a subtidal sand barrier; on one side was a broad coral reef, on the other a partly-enclosed tidal inlet. There is no evidence that the Bourewa settlers practised horticulture or agriculture at this time, their subsistence being predominantly marine foraging. After some 300 years of following this subsistence strategy, the inhabitants of Bourewa responded to sea-level fall and the arrival of cultivars (of taro and yam) by including horticulture. As sea level fell further, a total of 550 mm during the Lapita era, the tidal inlet dried up and marine-food resources diminished to a point where the natural environment of the Rove Peninsula could no longer sustain its Lapita inhabitants. All Lapita sites in the area were abandoned about 2500 cal BP (550 BCE), at the same time as the Lapita culture, marked by the end of dentate-pottery manufacture, came to an end in Fiji.     

论海南沦陷时期的日本占领政策

在抗战中日军侵占海南岛时期,日本力图将海南岛殖民地化,是其对海南岛占领政策的核心。为此,日本在推进其在海南岛的殖民活动、强化殖民统治机构、控制殖民体制下的文教事业等殖多方面可以说是不遗余力。其对海南岛的领土野心也就昭然若揭。     

China in Fiji: displacing traditional players?

A widely held perception in Oceania is that China has taken the opportunity of Western sanctions against Fiji's military-led regime to expand its influence in Fiji. Observers and media in the region were alarmed by the sudden increase of China's pledged aid to Fiji shortly after the 2006 military takeover. They are concerned that China has a well-calculated strategy of displacing traditional Western players in Fiji, most notably Australia and New Zealand. Such concern is not well founded. While China does have multiple interests, including strategic interests, in Fiji, there is no clear evidence to suggest that China aims to displace the traditional players there. China's growing influence in Fiji is part of China's global rise. Both Australia and New Zealand are committed to Fiji and the South Pacific as a whole. Given its substantial interests in Australia and New Zealand, it is not in China's interest to increase its influence in Fiji at the cost of its relations with these two traditional players.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.