Re-crossing a different water: colonialism and Third Worldism in Fiji

Abstract

This article will discuss the idea of the Third World in Fiji by analysing the internal tensions of the term and the plurality of trajectories emerging from the transnational spaces in which Fijian society must reconstitute itself after decolonisation and the coups of 1987 and 2000. The ethnic issues in Fiji have led to the employment of a number of strategies by both the indigenous and the Indian communities. Some consist of networking within transnational spaces and negotiation with external political and cultural flows, while others are more inward in their everyday strategies. This situation offers a non-reductive way to think about decolonisation, cultural transformation and notions of autonomy and Third World solidarity. The article assumes that cultural forms will always be made, unmade and remade. Communities can and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts. The relevant question is whether, and how, they convince and coerce insiders and outsiders, often in power-charged, unequal situations; for example, the issues of indigenous versus migrant rights to land and franchise in Fiji. Thus, what is lost and rediscovered in new situations becomes part of the realm of normal political or cultural activity.

Notes

Devleena Ghosh is in the Department of Writing, Journalism and Social Inquiry, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Email: [email protected].

D Chakrabarty speaking at a workshop on Subaltern, Multicultural and Indigenous Histories, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 20–21 July 2000.

See D Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks for Indian pasts’, Representations, 37, 1992.

M Kaplan & J Kelly, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, p 199.

P van der Veer (ed), Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

J Carens, ‘Democracy and respect for difference: the case of Fiji’, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 1992.

Carens, Democracy, p 576.

Ibid, p 594.

Ibid, p 595.

Ibid, p 628.

Ibid, p 574.

P France, The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, passim.

HJ Rutz, ‘Capitalizing on culture: moral ironies in urban Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29, 1987, p 557.

Ibid, p 538.

M Jolly, ‘Custom and the way of the land: past and present in Vanuatu and Fiji’, Oceania, 62, 1992.

M Kaplan, ‘The coups in Fiji: colonial contradictions and the post-colonial crisis’, Critique of Anthropology, 7 (3), 1988, pp 101–106.

Ibid, p 106. See also Brij V Lal, Broken Waves: a History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1992; and Lal, Crossing the Kala Pani: a Documentary History of Indian Indenture in Fiji, Canberra: Division of Pacific & Asian History, Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1998.

Jolly, ‘Custom and the way of the land’, p 346.

RG Ward, ‘Land in Fiji’, in BV Lal & Tomasi R Vakatora, Fiji in Transition: Research Papers of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission, Vol 1, Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1997, p 248.

JN Kamikamica, ‘Fiji native land: issues and challenges’, in Lal & Vakatora, Fiji in Transition, p 259.

J Waqanisau, ‘Fijians’ paramountcy—let's think rationally', undated letter circulated by email by academics at the University of the South Pacific (usp) after the coup in May 2000. I have a hard copy in my possession. This name appears to be a pseudonym and the identity of the writer is unknown to the usp academics who circulated the letter. However, the figures appear to be credible.

Letter from a group of unnamed indigenous Fijians circulated on a Fiji email list in June 2000. A hard copy is in my possession.

R Robertson, Retreat from exclusion? Identities in post-coup Fiji', in A Haroon Akram-Lodhi (ed), Confronting Fiji's Futures, Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2000, p 278.

United Press International (upi), 18 September 2000.

Ibid.

Kaplan & Kelly, Represented Communities, p 6.

K Ganguly, ‘Migrant identities: personal memory and the construction of selfhood’, Cultural Studies, 61, 1992, p 29.

Ibid, p 30.

Ibid, p 30.

Ibid, pp 31–34.

Alcoholic drink indigenous to Fiji.

J Leckie, ‘Women in post-coup Fiji: negotiating work through old and new realities’, in Akram-Lodhi, Confronting Fiji's Futures, pp 178–201.

B Lal, ‘From Labasa to Laucola Bay’, in Lal, Mr Tulsi's Store: a Fijian Journey, Canberra: Pandanus Books, Australian National University, 2001, p 93.

See also Leckie, ‘Women in post-coup Fiji’, p 187.

Balance, September–October 1997, pp 8–9.

Lal, ‘Kismet’, in Lal, Mr Tulsi's Store, p 200.

J-F Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans Georges Van Den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

V Mishra, ‘The feudal postcolonial: the Fiji crisis’, Meanjin, 3, pp 146–165.

Mishra, ‘The feudal postcolonial’, p 147.

Jolly, ‘Custom and the way of the land’, p 346.

RC Pillai, ‘Labourer’s Lament', in Subramani (ed), The Indo-Fijian Experience, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979, p 160.

R Norton, ‘Reconciling ethnicity and nation: contending discourses in Fiji’s constitutional reform', The Contemporary Pacific, 12 (1), 2000, p 110.

I Boxill, ‘Fiji: the limits of ethnic political mobilisation’, Race and Class, October–December 1997, p 41, n 2.

Nii-K Plange, ‘The “three Fijis” thesis: a critical examination of a neo-empiricist naturalistic analysis of Fiji’s polity', Journal of Pacific Studies, 15, 1990, p 21.

HJ Rutz, ‘Occupying the headwaters of tradition: rhetorical strategies of nation making in Fiji’, in RJ Foster (ed), Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

T Teaiwa, ‘Fiji crisis: an analysis’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 2000.

Rutz, ‘Occupying the headwaters of tradition’.

R Premdas, ‘Constitutional challenge: the rise of Fijian nationalism’, Pacific Perspective, 9, 1980, p 36.

Chakrabarty, workshop speech.

Subramani, Altering Imagination, Suva: Fiji Writers' Association, University of the South Pacific, 1995.

Norton, ‘reconciling ethnicity and nation’, p 106.

These sentiments were expressed in a number of emails and conversations with indigenous Fijians over the latter half of 2000.

Kamikamica, ‘Fiji native land’, pp 259–260.

Ibid, p 289.

Letter cited in footnote 21. Also interviews with interlocutors Suva S2, T3 and Nadi P4 and L7.

An interview with Subramani by V Hereniko, The Contemporary Pacific, 13 (1), 2001, p 184.

T Sanadhya, Bhut Len ki katha: Totaram Sanadhya ka Fiji, trans and ed Brij V Lal & Yogendra Yadav, New Delhi: Saraswati Press, 1994.

Mishra, ‘The feudal postcolonial’, pp 150–151.

MT Samisoni, ‘Thoughts on Fiji’s third coup d'etat', in BV Lal with M Pretes (eds), Coup: Reflections on the Political Crisis in Fiji, Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2001, p 44.

Kaplan & Kelly, Represented Communities, p 177.

The Age, 10 June 2000

S Lawson, ‘The state of Fiji’s statehood', in R. Rotberg (ed), State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002.

Chakrabarty, workshop speech.

J Clifford, ‘Indigenous articulations’, The Contemporary Pacific, 13 (2), 2001, p 468.