Introduction

With every breath we take we are inhaling the Pacific, the generator of two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen. The region is home to a great number of the world’s languages, ethnicities, and unique flora and fauna on land and in the sea. Yet the Pacific is almost absent in global discourse. An empty void on the world map, it is ignored in economic and environmental geopolitics, and often overlooked even in postcolonial studies, the discipline dedicated to minority perspectives. “Disappeared” by a focus on the continents at its edges, the terms of geopolitics and trade such as “trans-Pacific”, “Asia-Pacific” and “Australasia” pass over the Pacific islands as if they were, as the late Epeli Hau’ofa jokingly put it, “the hole in the doughnut” (2008, 37). This absence, along with ongoing western fantasies of the South Seas ever present in resort and cruise-boat tourism, is a modern form of colonialism. A plaything of nineteenth-century European imperialism, remnants of Pacific colonialism are present today, in the French DOM-TOM, Départements et territoires d'outre-mer the US’ military territories of Guam and American Samoa, and New Zealand’s Cook Islands and Niue. These direct imperialisms are joined by economic and military imperialism such as Australia’s refugee base on Nauru and the US nuclear testing site on the Marshall Islands. As Otto Heim states in the opening essay of this collection,

the diversity of constitutional arrangements and political situations in the contemporary Pacific is a reminder that decolonization cannot be reduced to a moment of constitutional transition when one flag is lowered and another raised, but represents a process of ongoing negotiation within western-style institutional frameworks. From this point of view, the question is not where decolonization has been accomplished and where it is as yet incomplete, but where it is ongoing and where it appears to have stopped.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crash, refugee crises, anti-austerity protests, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and increasingly polemical and populist elections in many nation-states, the present is marked by myriad forms of social unrest, channelling fear of loss of political representation and lack of employment opportunities into hostility to migration and critique of social inequality. These issues, newly relevant in mainstream media in the United States and Europe, are of long-standing concern in the Pacific. As a site significantly shaped by migration, indigenous rights, finance, trade and debt, global warming, resource extraction, and nuclear testing, the Pacific registers and reflects with great sensitivity the force of free-market neoliberal globalization, as well as its malcontents. There, the issues are not just theoretical abstractions but visual and visceral aspects of everyday lived reality. Pacific decolonization efforts are thus as much against globalization as they are for sovereignty. As Heim puts it, in “decoloniz[ing] the global” the Pacific resists western free-market (neo)liberal norms, proposing instead “island logics” that create and model alternatives to the hegemonic global political economy that are increasingly urgent and necessary on a global scale.

As the largest island nation in the Pacific, Aotearoa-New Zealand with its aggressive implementation of Thatcherite neoliberalism in the 1980s makes an interesting test case for analysis of the impact of free-market globalization on indigenous Pacific peoples. Māori (15 per cent of the population) and Pacific Islanders (7 per cent) are a powerful and visible presence in the country, and indeed form the majority of inhabitants in some areas of Auckland, which is commonly dubbed the “Polynesian capital of the world”. In particular, the simultaneous irruption of free-market liberalism and the Māori–Pakeha bicultural state mean that the two seemingly conflicting ideologies are mutually entangled. This awkward symbiosis offers opportunities to analyse strategies for indigenous sovereignty within the structures of globalization. While globalization’s connectivity may be useful for the myriad forms of decolonization Heim identifies, the example of the Māori sovereignty movement illuminates the pitfalls of indigeneity co-opted to neoliberal ends. Throughout the Pacific, including for Māori in New Zealand, the central, interlinked projects of land rights and indigenous sovereignty are also highly contested sites of control under global neoliberalism, for which private land ownership and profit-oriented use-value, and an emphasis on free movement of goods and finance, prevail over autonomy and protectionism.

The contradictions of global capitalism are also evident in New Zealand’s regional relationships with its neighbouring islands. While celebrating the contributions of Pasifika immigrants to national culture, New Zealand with its trade deals and immigration policies with Pacific island republics replicates colonial power relations. Despite New Zealand’s invitation to Pacific immigrants in the growth years of the 1960s, since the market retraction of manufacturing and labour-intensive jobs under neoliberal competition, immigrants have faced the threat of deportation as “over-stayers”, an inhospitality exacerbated by New Zealand’s colonial-era administration of Samoa under a League of Nations mandate until 1962. This contradictory impulse to embrace culture while gate-keeping access to social, economic and political protection is most evident on the home front, in the Māori sovereignty and cultural renaissance movements that began in the 1970s and continue today.

As in decolonizing strategies throughout the Pacific, Māori claims for recognition and rights have largely centred on cultural validation and control. Public focus on expressive culture has thus allowed social, economic and political structures of inequality to pass largely under the radar. The 2008 financial crisis and ongoing roll-back of the social state under three consecutive National governments have belatedly drawn attention to the fact that recognition and celebration of Māori culture has not led to corresponding gains in material well-being. Under neoliberalism, Māori and Pacific Island New Zealanders continue to fall behind Pakeha (white New Zealanders) in almost all social indicators, including poverty, unemployment, educational attainment, morbidity and life expectancy. Alongside significant public focus on the negative impact of globalization on the environment, the post-2008 shift of attention to economic inequality has brought to light alarming rates of poverty and its deleterious impacts on mind, body, community, and indeed the nation as a whole. Māori and Pacific Islanders in New Zealand disproportionately suffer levels of poverty that are an indictment on a first-world nation, including overcrowding in uninhabitable living spaces, and diseases such as tuberculosis and whooping cough thought eradicated in the mid-twentieth century.

Māori and Pasifika cultures have never been more visible in the mainstream and international public eye, while the socio-economic damage that continues to erode their communities remains largely out of sight and off the political agenda, in New Zealand as in trans-Pacific geopolitics. The arguments in this collection call attention to this gap, arguing that “all that glitters is not gold”, and scratching beneath the patina that construes globalization as the panacea for reducing inequalities by raising quality of life. Under the rubric suggested by Heim of “decolonizing the global”, the essays demonstrate how writer and performer artist-activists from as disparate spaces as Guam, the Philippines, New Zealand and Hawai’i are nevertheless united in their unequivocal, strident criticism of the devastation of their environments, livelihoods, cultures and health by the economic globalization that they see as the direct legacy of imperial colonization that co-opted the Pacific in a capitalist logic. The essays in this collection analyse works of fiction, performance poetry, theatre, documentary film, and social media which embody strategies of resistance and propose alternative structures of the imaginary and the affective, of community, exchange and political organization.

Michelle Keown’s essay focuses on nuclear imperialism and the Marshall Islands diaspora that is a direct result of forced displacement to make way for US nuclear testing on Bikini atoll. While islanders were persuaded to leave their homeland to clear the way for weapons development “for the good of mankind and to end all wars”, the resulting environmental damage has rendered the atoll uninhabitable for an estimated 30,000 years. Keown analyses Marshallese eco-poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s protest literature as an antidote to the “slow violence” resulting “from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change … underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory” (Nixon 2011, 2). Not merely indexing the disastrous consequences of global flows of people, capital and technologies for Pacific Islanders, Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry infiltrates globalized political and technological platforms such as online social media, peer-sharing, and climate change conferences to raise awareness of, and potentially gain redress for, the socio-economic and environmental problems faced by contemporary Pacific Islanders.

In the case of speculative fiction, Dolores Herrero and Eleanor Byrne explore texts that challenge anthropogenic conceptions of control of the environment, and containment and manipulation of the human body. In her work, particularly the post-apocalyptic Locust Girl (2015), Philippine–Australian writer Merlinda Bobis imagines a dystopian future in which human-centred capitalist logic is threatening the survival of humans, other species and the planet as a whole. The novel speculates on the power of globalized markets to control and commodify human lives, with pernicious hybridization effectively erasing life-preserving distinctions between the human and the non-human. The novel’s posthuman protagonist is read by Herrero allegorically not only as a critique of the Anthropocene, but also as an exploration of the non-human, currently evident in the inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in Australia’s Pacific containment zones in Papua New Guinea, Nauru and Manus Island. In the face of the violence generated by budding racism, territorial redefinition and the lack of universal citizenship, Herrero argues, Bobis's novel is a desperate call to implement an ethics of alterity, of a politics of care against a politics of fear. Like Bobis, Hanya Yanagihara in The People in the Trees (2013) shatters utopian western stereotypes of pristine Pacific island nature by portraying instead a dystopia of mutations and threat that Eleanor Byrne in her essay analyses through the concept of “the dark archaeology of anthropology”. Yanagihara’s fictional Pacific Micronesian island is visited, pillaged and ecologically devastated by two US scientists, anthropologist Paul Tallent and immunologist and virologist Norton Perina, the latter based on the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, whose contribution to western epistemology is tainted by his conviction as a sex offender of some of the fifty-six children he adopted from Papua New Guinea. The novel’s tropical ecoGothic imaginary imparts the feeling of unsettled settling, a haunting of part-buried traumas of invasion and massacre (of people and of nature) that undermines the narrative of western scientific fact-finding, of anthropology, archival data and medical science.

Moving into a study of more direct forms of activism, Emma Scanlon analyses Haunani-Kay Trask’s activist poetry for her valuable messages about native belonging and indigenous activism in Hawai’i. In the collection Light in the Crevice Never Seen (1999), Trask explores permutations of the concept of “aloha ʻāina” in a way that literally translates “love for the land” into a patriotic duty to protect the environment. Trask issues a furious indictment of globalized Hawai’i, the “paradise” of the western imagination, as tourism shapes employment patterns, affecting wages, house prices, land availability and access, and cultural practices. Separated from the ʻāina, the indigenous body is fed but the psyche is disrupted, in the “prostitution” of native culture internalized in fear, shame and anger, and expressed in violence, madness, addiction and suicide. Trask offers a way forward through relationality, Scanlon argues, comprising an individual’s behaviour and commitment to the land and culture, in which intimate sexual love is symbolically inseparable from “aloha ʻāina”, thereby configuring the embrace as the space of decolonization rather than the racist tool of miscegenation.

Chris Prentice’s study bridges the Pacific to the New Zealand context. As in the Pacific, the long history of Māori voyaging maps in movement the long history of intersection with capitalism, from the colonial era of globalization to its postcolonial forms. Prentice illustrates through analysis of two Māori novels, Paula Morris’s Rangatira, about a colonial-era Māori tour of Britain, and James George’s Ocean Roads, which witnesses the Pacific War, nuclear warfare and testing. Pointing out that these two novels show awareness of the long history of indigenous expressive culture co-opted into exchange-value, Prentice reads them through Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” to demonstrate how they “reveal both the stakes and the possibilities of (re)conceiving culture outside of market relations”. In negotiating the pitfalls of commodification and consumerism that assimilate indigenous culture into a dominant economic structure, “the novels’ indigenous critique of globalization is also a critique of colonizing-global constructions of indigeneity”. Both novels formally fragment memory, tradition and cultural “truths”, thereby resisting being roped into a comprehensive whole. Thus, “fragments serve to signify limits, partiality, singularity, to reopen a space, a blankness”.

Melissa Kennedy's and Jennifer Lawn’s essays on recent New Zealand fiction that registers economic inequality and its expressions in poverty and inequality (Kennedy) and precarity (Lawn) are wholly more pessimistic about the role of literature to offer alternative configurations. Their survey of Māori fiction that registers in incomprehensibility and inarticulacy the difficulty of defining the neoliberal present asks if there may be formal limitations in realist narrative fiction that colludes with rather than resists constructs of the nation and of capitalism, which historically arose concomitantly with the novel genre. The “relatively unstable and dispersed conditions of deprivation and insecurity” that Simon During (2015, 19) identifies as constitutive of neoliberal-era precarity have impacted on the lack of cohesion and subsequent fracturing of society across New Zealand that Lawn identifies in her analysis of neoliberal-era fiction, particularly in what she calls “ironies of failed intersectionality”: encounters between people of diverse ethnic, class and national backgrounds, in which potential for connection is continuously closed off. As Kennedy argues in her essay on representations of Māori poverty in Māori fiction, the neoliberal-era competition for resources and political influence has also pitted Māori against each other, leading to significant class-like tensions and divisions between rich and poor Māori. Exploring the same cluster of socio-economic (dis)ease in a Pacific context, Paloma Fresno-Calleja’s study of “gastrocolonialism” considers the effects of the western diet and food habits on Pacific Islanders, who suffer from one of the world’s highest percentages of obesity, heart problems and diabetes. She analyses Pacific essays, fiction and poetry that resist the global food landscape that is devastating local populations and ecosystems alike, such as through genetically modified crops, plantation monoculture, chemical poisons and intensive farming. Pacific gastropolitics, she argues, aims to recover the health and well-being of the indigenous body through traditional food practices and culinary knowledge.

Anna Smith’s essay closes the collection with analysis of the commodification of New Zealand children’s writer Margaret Mahy in a government-funded, privately built playground in Christchurch. The essay explores the public–private nexus that is a feature of global capital encrusted in urban planning, the dynamics of which are amplified by the city rebuild following a series of earthquakes that razed a significant proportion of the central business district. The foreign companies contracted to build the playground register the contemporary global flows of finance with which private capital generates and sustains the city’s infrastructure. This global geopolitics is matched by local cultural politics, as the region’s Māori tribe, Ngāi Tahu, stepped into the vacuum caused by the earthquake, with significant input into redevelopment that recuperates a hitherto submerged history of the area. As Smith argues, “while the reach of global capital is ubiquitous, thereby limiting specific and idiosyncratic alternatives, re-envisioning local postcolonial space remains a project both desirable and imperative”. As a public site and children’s attraction, which blends Māori and Pakeha cultural elements, the playground fulfils an everyday need to come together in public participation. Ngāi Tahu’s creative response that emerged out of the destruction of a natural disaster suggests areas of agency for indigenous populations that are increasingly pressing as climate change impacts on Pacific ecologies and economies. Heated debate over the extent to which Ngāi Tahu is complicit in or resisting economic and political inequalities is equally played out in the Pacific region.