Oceanic Hauntings?: Race–Culture–Place between Vanuatu and Hawai'i

Abstract

This paper considers how far past ideologies of race and of racial and cultural mixing are haunting the present in Oceania. It compares colonial histories and contemporary politics in two Pacific archipelagoes, Vanuatu, an independent state since 1980 and Hawai'i, a state of the US since 1959. In Vanuatu indigenous people are a dominant majority and land is still held primarily through customary custodianship (despite pressure for privatisation) while in Hawai'i indigenous people are a declining minority and were dispossessed of most of their land in the mid-nineteenth century. In both places Western ideologies of race have had to confront more generous conceptions of the relations between persons and places as constructed by indigenous genealogies. But the ghosts of racial ideology and past colonial obsessions with racial and cultural purity and mixing are still alive in both countries.

Keywords:

• Oceania
• Racial Mixing
• Haunting
• Colonialism

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors for their engaging comments and timely feedback. Particular thanks to Michelle Antoinette for a discerning reading of both substance and style. This research has been funded by the Australian National University and the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Oceanic Encounters, DP 0451620.

Notes

1. Archives d'Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, Fonds Ministeriels, Series geographiques, FM/SG/NHB.

2. Compare Young (Colonial Desire, 1995) on the complicity between notions of race and culture, and Stoler (Sexual Affronts, 2002) on cultural basis for adjudications about racial status in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Jolly

Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Centre in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. She has written extensively on gender and sexuality in the Pacific, on indigenous and foreign representations in the contexts of exploratory voyages and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, and cinema and the visual arts. Her most recent publications are Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (ed. 2001) with Kalpana Ram; and Birthing in the Pacific: Beyond Tradition and Modernity? (ed. 2002 with Vicki Lukere)