The Festivalization of Pacific Cultures in New Zealand: Diasporic Flow and Identity within Transcultural Contact Zones

Abstract

Pacific festivals in the twenty-first century are a highly visible feature of New Zealand's festival landscape, with some twenty-five annual events taking place along the length of the country. This article attempts to trace an understanding of what they mean, in the context of diaspora and diasporic identity. After outlining a brief history of Pacific peoples and festivals in New Zealand, I argue that festivals are sites through which the complex nature of diasporic identity is performed. Expressing a multilocal sense of belonging, this performance of identity highlights the fluid nature of connection, emphasizing movement and histories in the creation of diasporic identity.

Notes

¹ Throughout this article I use multiple terms to refer to peoples and notions of the Pacific, such as Pasifika, Pacific Islanders, Oceanic peoples, Pacific people(s) and the Pacific diaspora. These terms are used interchangeably to reflect that multiple labels exist and are used, and to acknowledge the ongoing negotiation occurring within Pacific communities over their usage, with no single term finding universal acceptance.

² Where I refer to the Pasifika Festival (capitalized), I am referring to this festival alone. Where I refer to a Pasifika festival (uncapitalized), I am referring to them generally, or to one of the other festivals that follow the same model.

³ The true connections between New Zealand and the Pacific, of course, were established when the indigenous Māori voyaged to Aotearoa. For the purposes of this article, I am discussing the socio-political nation ‘New Zealand’, popularly given a birth-date with the 6 February 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, although I acknowledge that varying opinions on this matter exist.

⁴ Available from < http://stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/pacific_peoples.aspx>. By comparison, people who identified as Māori made up 14.6 per cent% of the population, Asian 9.2 per cent and European 67.6 per cent. Complicating the results, however, was a new category, New Zealander, to which 12.9 per cent identified, and Indo-Fijians, who are counted as Indian and therefore part of the Asian ethnic category. Ten per cent of people identified with more than one ethnic category.

⁵ Given that a large number of people, if not the majority, who attend these festivals are of Pacific heritage themselves, I argue that this is therefore not purely or only a consumption of ‘otherness’, but rather a celebration of culture through consumption.

⁶ By Festival of the Arts, I mean a festival that comprises a combination of free and ticketed events, across a variety of art forms, venues, days and times and, as such, is a vastly different festival model from the free, one-day, large-scale community model under which Pasifika festivals are run. The model under which the Multicultural/Community Festival is run is essentially the same as Pasifika, but with an intention of not being solely Pacific focused.

⁷ See McIntosh (2001) and Teaiwa and Mallon (2006) for discussions of the interface between Māori and Pacific peoples. My study has focused on diasporic Pacific cultures and peoples in New Zealand, and therefore excludes Māori, whose relationship to the New Zealand nation is one of indigeneity. Despite this, and because of the fact that Māori are Pacific people, many festivals are specifically inclusive of Māori representation. The festivals that comprise this study are therefore often broadly representative of notions of Pacificness, despite my specific focus. Festivals that are specifically constructed as Māori events do not form part of this study though, and, indeed, they are not self-identified as ‘Pacific festivals’.

⁸ See the Polyfest website, < http://www.asbpolyfest.co.nz/asbpolyfest-1254442701.html> and < http://www.asbpolyfest.co.nz/mediaPR.html>, for further background information.

⁹ See < http://www.asbpolyfest.co.nz/sponsors.html>.

¹⁰ In talking to people involved with the establishment of the Pasifika Festival in 1993, and others, about why it appeared that the first festivals of this kind should have started in Wellington, as opposed to Auckland, many highlighted that this was in fact not surprising given the large numbers of Pacific peoples spread across a large area and throughout many communities in Auckland. By comparison, to bring the as diverse but smaller numbers of Pacific peoples together in Wellington for a festival was more easily achieved without the significant council support and resources that would be required to start Pasifika in the early 1990s.

¹¹ Where I use Pacific identities I mean the full range of possibilities, whether it be people who claim their identity as ‘Pacific’ and/or Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Niuean, Tokelauan, and so on. I use it here simply as an easy way of capturing this diversity within one term; I use ‘identities’ with an emphasis on plurality.

¹² Included in this are Pacific people who participate not only in their own cultural display, but also in being exposed to other Pacific cultural performance.

¹³ Many people I interviewed used familial terms to refer to other Pacific people, such as ‘our Pacific brothers and sisters’, ‘our other Pacific cousins’ and ‘Pacific family’.

¹⁴ Tangata whenua means ‘people of the land’, or indigenous.

¹⁵ The notion of the Pacific as intimate was something put to me by Roy Vaughan when discussing his time spent in and out of the Pacific over many years. He recounted several stories that demonstrated how close personal connections existed between islands separated by great distances, as if made by people living as neighbours. I raised this notion in a subsequent interview with a dancer who performed at Pasifika 2010, someone born in Tonga and who has moved back and forth between Tonga, Australia and New Zealand throughout her life. She agreed, providing me with examples of how quickly popular dance movements had travelled between islands.

¹⁶ A moniker adopted by the turn of the twenty-first-century Auckland City Council. Auckland as the ‘biggest Polynesian city in the world’ is now more frequently employed.

¹⁷ Hawaiki, in various forms, is the ancestral/mythical homeland of many Pacific cultures, including Māori.

¹⁸ The notion of ‘Kiwi-ness’, or a New Zealand identity, is extremely problematic and well beyond the scope of this paper. The struggle for a New Zealand identity, or whether one can logically exist, has been well documented, and centres around (white, colonial) settler imagery, the place of indigenous Māori and the multicultural reality of twenty-first-century New Zealand (see, for example, Smith 2003; Skilling 2008).