Island Logic and the Decolonization of the Pacific

Abstract

This essay addresses the conditions of decolonization in the contemporary Pacific in the context of renewed investment in and competition over the regional construct of the Asia Pacific as a sphere of global prosperity. Considering the apparent idiosyncrasy of political arrangements across the region and the ongoing reproduction of states of precariousness due to militarization, depletion of resources and environmental damage, it asks what conceptual and discursive coherence the postcolonial Pacific can lend to movements of decolonization constrained by the progress of globalization. I borrow the idea of ‘island logic’ from Roland Greene in order to outline the capacity of seemingly isolated and abandoned locations to challenge the unimpeded operation of what David Harvey has described as the capitalist and territorial logics of contemporary imperialism. The essay ends by highlighting examples of recent cultural initiatives and projects that demonstrate such island logic at work in the formation of emergent political alliances, or publics, committed to exposing states of precariousness and thereby working towards conditions of flourishing and sustainability.

• Decolonization
• island logic
• Oceania
• Pacific century
• precarity

Notes

1 For a discussion of the difference between the compacts of free association entered by New Zealand and the United States, see Firth (1989, 77–83). Although being in a de facto less intrusive relationship of free association with New Zealand than Palau, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia maintain with the United States, the Cook Islands and Niue are not members of the United Nations on account of their restricted sovereignty.

2 Australia and New Zealand’s status is ambiguous because they are key members of Pacific Rim organizations like APEC as well as (usually separately identified) members of the Pacific Island Forum. Papua New Guinea is the only (other) Pacific Island member of APEC, while the PIF has observer status.

3 The poorest countries in the region in terms of per capita GDP are those with the greatest export sectors that have seen their natural resources depleted by logging, mining and fishing ventures controlled by foreign businesses (Hezel 2012, 12; Tisdell 2006, 5, 14; Wesley-Smith 2007, 37–39).

4 Recall also George Shultz, who told participants at a Pacific Rim conference in 1985, ‘We are all members of the community of nations surrounding the Pacific. The Pacific has become the twentieth century’s economic fountain of youth’ (Connery 1995, 47).

5

‘From everyone, regardless of gender or origins, an individualized capacity for risk management is now required, with which a precariousness that cannot be assured can be actualized in different ways and which materializes differently depending on the social positioning of precarity’. (Lorey 2015, 89)

6 For the expansion of the international airport in Majuro, ‘the last healthy coral in Majuro Lagoon was dredged to be used as aggregate for the airstrip’ (Kupferman 2016, 143).

7

‘According to a 23 November [2012] report by Amnesty International, researchers on a recent three-day inspection of the facility in Nauru found a ‘toxic mix of uncertainty, unlawful detention and inhumane conditions creating an increasingly volatile situation on Nauru, with the Australian Government spectacularly failing in its duty of care to asylum seekers’ (‘Australia’s’ 2012).

See also Karlsen (2016).

8 For a recent assessment of the viability of Pacific Island states’ economies and the limited success of conventional pathways for economic development, see Hezel (2012). Auckland University legal scholar Jane Kelsey has described PACER Plus as ‘a form of “contemporary colonization”’ (Cordemans 2009).

9 Similarly, island logic makes it possible to conceive, following Escobar, that ‘practices of difference that remain in the exteriority … of the modern/colonial world system [can] enact a politics of place that contrasts with the grandiose politics of ‘the Revolution’ and with conceptions of anti-imperialist politics that require that empire be confronted in its totality’ (2004, 221).