“Oceania as Peril and Promise: Towards a Worlded Vision of Transpacific Ecopoetics”

Excerpt from Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnso

Photography and History in the Pacific Islands; Visual Histories and Photographic Evidence

Over the last decade, historical research into photography in the Pacific has grown and diversified, yet an enormous amount of visual material remains untapped, new approaches and questions await exploration, and most historians still neglect critical engagement with visual evidence. This article, in summarising developments in the historical research of photography both generally and in the Pacific, identifies directions in recent work, and argues that closer links between visual history and Pacific History promise revisions and new vistas of Pacific pasts

“Introduction: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies”

Excerpt from Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnso

Weaving a "Hybrid Mat": Samoa meets the Solomons.

Developed nations providing aid and educational support for less wealthy countries, have frequently imposed their own ideas and practices in a top-down manner. A recent collaborative aid project between the New Zealand and Solomon Islands Governments, has been more equitable by developing the project as a "Partnership". As a New Zealander involved with this project, I found participation in the Partnership activities to be rewarding and enlightening. The metaphor of a "hybrid mat" is used to weave together narratives from my pre-Partnership life and career events with narratives from my partnership experiences. Clandinin and Connelly's renowned concept of "stories" is utilised throughout to illustrate how perceptions of events can vary from person to person. "Cover" stories (the "official" narrative of events for outsiders); "secret" stories (narratives available only to insiders); and "re-storying" (placing a story within a context/place and negotiating the meanings of the story) are concepts used to illustrate the complexity and multiple explanations and understandings that come from narratives. It is through "re-storying" the combined "cover" and "secret" stories that a third space of understanding is revealed. This article traces the process and product of understanding and re-storying a particular "hybrid mat" for the writer

Culture Moves? The Festival of Pacific Arts and Dance Remix in Oceania

This reflective essay is a journey through my dance studies work with a discussion on the role of the Festival of Pacific Arts in shaping dance in Oceania, and particularly its impact on Banaban dance from Rabi in Fiji. I encourage future discussion and development of a field of �Pacific Dance Studies,� with preliminary thoughts on the role of �remix� in Pacific dance practices, especially as they are shaped by and reflected in this important regional festival

Review of \u3cem\u3eProfessional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazar Williams\u3c/em\u3e by Michael Leroy Oberg

Reviews the book Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazar Williams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Michael Leroy Oberg

The lure of texts and the discipline of praxis: cross-cultural history in a post-empirical world

The main aim of this paper is to tell stories about interactions between European voyagers and Aboriginal people in New Holland (mainland Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the end of the eighteenth century

"The Martial Islands": Making Marshallese Masculinities between American and Japanese Militarism

For over a century, the Marshall Islands have been entangled between the United States and Japan in their conquest of the Central Pacific; yet because of this, these islands have also been a place where multiple masculinities have converged, competed, and transformed each other. This is especially true around the site of Kwajalein Atoll, where terrain understood in Marshallese terms as female or maternal has been reshaped and masculinized through the semiotics of colonialism and militarization. This article focuses specifically on three local representations of masculinity: the knowledgeable but strategic Marshallese "Etao," symbolized by a creative and resourceful male trickster spirit; the heroic but paternalistic American "Patriot," as enacted via the perpetual battlefield of military and weapons-testing missions; and the adventurous but self-sacrificing "Dankichi," deployed in Japan during the 1930s and echoed nowadays in the long-distance tuna-fishing industry. Cross-reading Judith Butler and R W Connell, this is an exploration of the "theater" of these masculinities in relationship to one another, and the story of how different superpowers strive for domination by emasculating a third colonial site and its subjects