The call for papers for PHA 2018 in London and Cambridge is now closed.
We anticipate being able to financially support a limited number of scholars coming from independent Pacific states to the sum of approximately £500 each. Please contact the conference committee separately: phacambridge2018@gmail.com
LIST OF PANELS
Panel Title: Gifts of Connection: Case Studies on Place and Perspective
Convenors: Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman & Susan Y. Najita, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Email: akstill@umich.edu
For Pacific Islanders continuing to overcome historical experiences of colonialist disruption, the very notion of history can be a gift that connects Islanders with multifarious modes of knowledge and knowing. This panel seeks to bring together both the content and the process dimensions of knowledge and knowing, by considering sources and their “readings” or “hearings” or “seeings” in ways that are meaningful to Islanders. Historical awareness may be heightened by uncovering unknown sources, reconnecting with sources that have been out of sight, or juxtaposing disparate sources of information Historical awareness may also be triggered by experiencing sensory perception that draws forth a flood of memories and associations. When perceptions and experiences are anchored by relationships to places of genealogical reckoning, the experience of that place is intensified manifold. We invite submissions that explore the workings of affect and historical awareness in relation to experiences of place, especially as those linkages are mediated through sources that require alternative or multiple modes of perception.
Number of papers in this session: 9
Panel Title: The ‘gift’ of Samoan transnational chiefs: Ancestor god avatars or merely title-holders?
Lead Convenors: Lupematasila Dr Melani Anae, University of Auckland and Seulupe Dr Falaniko Tominiko, Unitec Institute of Technology
Email: m.anae@auckland.ac.nz
The title of this panel is based on a three-year study of matai (Samoan chiefs) living, born or raised outside the islands of Samoa, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, and led by Lupematasila Dr Melani Anae and her team. Historical work on Samoan faamatai (chiefly system) has focussed on faamatai in Samoa. The papers presented in this panel builds on these strengths and pushes towards new understandings of social, cultural and every-day faamatai, exploring new realms of transnational faamatai understood and practised by inter-generational matai – pioneer matai and their children, who live in the transnational space. The papers presented by the panel convenors also draw from findings from a two-day Transnational faamatai symposium held at the Fale Pasifika, University of Auckland in November 2017, which brought together transnational matai from Australia, Hawaii, and California; transnational matai leaders in New Zealand; and both local and international scholars of Samoa and emerging Samoan scholars, as they searched for new and inclusive understandings of the gift of faamatai in the past and present, and the turn towards new horizons.
The interdisciplinary, intergenerational, transnational stories, experiences and dialogue encountered at these sites point to the centrality of aiga affective ties – the complex emotional and social ties between Samoan migrants and their communities of origin as the transnational ‘glue’ which energises and underpins the faamatai as an aiga framework for action which defines the relationships between people economically, politically, socially and spiritually.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: The Gift of Youth: New Directions in Pacific History
Lead Convenor: Nicholas Hoare, Australian National University
Email: nicholas.hoare@anu.edu.au
Aside from her formidable scholarship, Teresia Teaiwa was an inspirational mentor and educator. She was a gift to all those who came across her, however none felt, and are continuing to feel, the effects of her gift more than those postgraduate students who by their very nature tend to dwell ‘on the edge’ of the discipline. By drawing on this spirit of inclusivity and youthful energy, we aim to showcase up and coming historical research by postgraduate students on any Pacific-related subject. Though our call for papers is deliberately broad, preference will be given to later year postgraduates and students of Pacific Island descent.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Recontextualizing Oral and Performance Traditions in Micronesia
Lead Convenor: Evelyn Flores, University of Guam
Email: evelynrflores@yahoo.com
Acts of cultural recovery are not simply those of digging out long buried signifiers of culture or of re-energizing practices that have been depressed. There is also the work of recontextualizing both continuously practiced as well as excavated oral and performance traditions. Such a task is critical considering newness and change. There are processes of redefinition and hybridizing mobilized to bridge the original practice with the current practice in what might be called ironic acts of transculturation. The papers presented in this panel will explore the meanings and terms of recontextualizing acts. They will examine how these challenge or transcend boundaries within the culture itself; how they create something new and perhaps even dangerous; how they devalue as well as revalue. In short, they will explore how what, to all appearances, appears to be traditional is also, in profound ways, new.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Decolonization in Melanesia: Comparative Perspectives and Multiple Conversations
Lead Convenor: Alex Golub, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Email: golub@hawaii.edu
There is a substantial body of literature on decolonization in Melanesia, focusing on the decades after WWII when Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji achieved independence. The current politics of independence and autonomy in West Papua, New Caledonia, and Bougainville are also the subject of a good deal of literature. However, much of this work is focused on national histories of independence, despite that fact that the independence era was characterized by international dialogue as thinkers, ideas, and policies moved across the world. This panel seeks to create a broader regional perspective on decolonization in Melanesia by accepting papers which look beyond national borders to the international flows of ideas which helped feed the independence era. We are also interested in comparative papers which locate common themes in independence struggles, or which otherwise reach out across national boundaries.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: The Gift of Gender in Pacific History
Lead Convenor: Margaret Jolly, Australian National University
Email: margaret.jolly@anu.edu.au
Echoing the words of the late Teresa Teaiwa about the gift of the Pacific and celebrating her own bountiful writings on gender this panel invites presenters to reflect on the way gender has suffused the writing of Pacific history. We are hoping to address broad themes including the intersections of gender and race in the past and the present, and the complex connections between Indigenous and introduced notions of gender and sexuality. We will ponder how relations of gender and sexuality are important not just in intimate lives but in Oceanic experiences of transformations of public collective life associated with Christianity and in the geopolitics of state formation, militarism and nuclear testing. We invite reflective presentations from diverse positions and perspectives and in manifold genres, embracing the textual and the visual, the scholarly and the creative.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: The United States in the Pacific, from the inside out and the outside in: A roundtable discussion
Lead Convenor: Tom Smith, University of Cambridge
Email: tds33@cam.ac.uk
In recent decades, a number of scholars have been critical of the tendencies which emerge when looking at the Pacific Ocean from the United States outwards, arguing that the American vision has often been one which sees the vast and dynamic oceanic world as little more than a bridge to Asia, with the ocean itself as a ‘vast American lake’ or the ‘hole in the doughnut’. This roundtable discussion brings together scholars working on various aspects of the United States’ historical engagements with the Pacific Ocean in order to survey the state of the field, to ask whether the United States can still offer a useful perspective from which to think about the Pacific, and to explore the different ways of thinking about the United States offered by the Pacific.
Number of speakers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Decolonizing Methodologies in Sāmoa, American Sāmoa and Hawaiʻi
Lead Convenor: Maile Arvin, University of Utah
Email: maile.arvin@utah.edu
Recent studies of Oceania and of U.S. imperialism have widely expanded our understanding of indigenous perspectives and formations of empire. Our panel considers the ways indigenous peoples interacted with, pushed against, and persevered within the boundaries of empire. This panel shares research on the historical specificities of imperialism in Sāmoa, American Sāmoa, and Hawaiʻi, approached from critical Indigenous and Pacific Islander Studies perspectives. We interrogate how US imperialism and settler colonialism continue to structure certain forms of empire as expected and settled places, despite histories that are more complex.
Invited speakers only. This panel is closed to paper submissions.
Panel Title: Blackness in Oceania Revisited: In Honor of Teresia Teaiwa
Lead Convenor: Joy Enomoto, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
Email: joyenomo@gmail.com
In 2016, for the Pacific Histories Association Conference in Guahan, Dr. Teresia Teaiwa, brought together a group of “Afro-nesian” women scholars, activists and artists to interrogate the meaning of Black lives in Oceania historically and in the present through the lens of art, language, and music. The panel combined ritual, song, visual arts, poetry and critical discussion. As a continuum of this critical conversation started by Dr. Teaiwa and as moment to begin a new conversation, this panel would engage in the current moment of Black identity and meaning making in Oceania through the intersections of language, art, song and performance. We will query the constructions of political Blackness in the Pacific, the foundations of Black cultural identities and whether there is such a place as a “Black Pacific.” If such a place exists, where and how do genealogies of Blackness meet in Oceania? What stories do we share, what visions do we see for the future?
Invited speakers only. This panel is closed to paper submissions.
Panel Title: Pacific History in Museums and Cultural Centres. Whose history, how presented?
Lead Convenor: Steven Hooper, Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia
Email: s.hooper@uea.ac.uk
This panel will explore issues connected to how museums and cultural centres in the Pacific and beyond have engaged with and are engaging (or not) with Pacific history – and whose interpretation of ‘history’. It will also look to the future, and at how institutions can develop their engagement with their own local audiences and with visiting audiences. Among other things, papers can focus on how Pacific artworks and material culture embody history and histories, and how these material manifestations can or should be deployed in display contexts. Song, chant, dance and craft skills are also vehicles for history-making and engaging with the Pacific past, as well as consciously taking historical identities into the future, and preserving ‘heritage’ in institutional contexts.
Papers are invited which provide case studies of, or reflections on, museum and cultural centre practice – past, present and planned, both in the Pacific and beyond. What lessons can be learned from past practice about how the past can be experienced in contemporary institutional contexts? Aside from the long-established metropolitan museums, many smaller Pacific island groups have developed, and are developing, their own institutions for their own audiences. The Vanuatu Cultural Centre is a well-known example, established in the 1970s with an innovative agenda. This panel aims to be forward-looking, investigating how best Pacific institutions, and those which hold Pacific material, can provide informed perspectives on the past and the achievements of Pacific islanders.
Number of papers in this session: 10
Panel title: Pacific Futures, Past and Present: History, Environment, Technology
Lead Convenor: Miranda Johnson, University of Sydney
Email: miranda.johnson@sydney.edu.au
How, when, and why has the Pacific been a locus for imagining different futures by those living there as well as passing through? What does that tell us about the distinctiveness or otherwise of this “sea of islands”? In this panel, we will discuss a range of future-making projects, including anti-nuclear and environmental activism; Marshall Islanders’ legal struggles and the power of survivorship on the international stage; new political and cultural investment in acceleration in the post-World War II Pacific, associated with the coming of flight; nineteenth-century racial imaginations in southern New Zealand; and postcolonial Oceanic history-writing. Together, these papers aim to foreground a diverse set of approaches to, and examples of, how futures are being conceived in the region and have been imagined in the past, challenging scholars of the Pacific to consider possibility, aspiration and temporality as critical to historical inquiry in the region.
Invited speakers only. This panel is closed to paper submissions.
Panel Title: The early History of Photography; Place and Perspective
Lead Convenor: Max Quanchi, University of Queensland
Email: quanchi.amqfu@gmail.com
The Panel’s approach to early photography is loose, from the 19th century through to the start of the Pacific War in 1941. The Panel is open to examine individual images, photographers, studios, albums, postcards, lantern slides, travel photography, official reports, expedition photography, domestic photography, illustrated books, pictorialism, photojournalism, propaganda, and links between photography and art, literature, science, anthropology, gender, and history.Any photograph or body of photography, published or in repositories, from or about the Pacific Islands (excluding NZ, Australia) is the centre of interest. The first History of Photography panel at the PHA was at UH-Hilo in 1996, with myself as convenor, and with some gaps have run at most conferences, most recently at Guam (2016).
Number of papers in this session: 9
Panel Title: The inanity and damaging consequences of the Melanesia/Polynesia distinction: further case studies
Convenors: Louise Mataia-Milo Saui’a, Marc Tabani, Serge Tcherkezoff
Email: serge@pacific-dialogues.fr
This panel will gather case studies that exemplify how the “Melanesia/Polynesia distinction” is a hindrance to get an historical understanding of the multifactorious encounters that happened in the Pacific, whether between Pacific people or between them and European early voyagers. For instance, scholarship has essentialized linguistic-cultural diversity with hypotheses of arrivals of “Polynesian” groups into “Melanesia”. In some cases, as in southern Vanuatu, the whole notion of “Polynesian outliers [in Melanesia]” needs to be reconsidered. In the case of early Pacific-European encounters, scholarship created a misconstrued opposition between the “peaceful and generous hospitality” of the “Polynesians” and the violence that was to be expected from the people further in the West, who became labelled the “Melanesians”. It is time to reconsider Polynesian cases and to take a comparative view at the chain of successive clashes of interpretations, from both sides of the encounters, that led so systematically to violence.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Constructing Pacific Lives
Convenors: Kate Fullager, Macquarie University, Sydney & Harriet Parsons, Melbourne University
Email: kate.fullagar@mq.edu.au
The panel explores problems and possibilities in the construction of Pacific individuals of the eighteenth (and nineteenth?) century. Figures such as Tupaia and Mai are familiar in Pacific scholarship as important go-betweens for Islander and European relations during their lifetimes. Most historians have employed anthropological, social, and art history traditions to represent their lives. Recent work, however, has uncovered some limitations to these typical methods. The panelists here discuss new approaches to the sources on early Pacific lives, drawing on intellectual and comparative history traditions.
Number of papers in this session: 4
Panel Title: Access and discovery: engagement with Pacific Islands archives
Convenors: Kari James, Eve Haddow & Myjolynne Kim, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University
Email: Kari.James@anu.edu.au
We might consider archival material ‘a gift’ for those interested in the history of the Pacific. However, utilisation of this material is dependent on discovery and access. This session considers the future of archives in the Pacific, particularly in light of the digital turn and a growing workforce of talented archive practitioners and researchers based in the islands. How are individuals and communities engaging in archives in innovative ways in the Pacific today? How do we negotiate the challenges of working with archival material that is politically and culturally sensitive – a gift from the ancestors not knowingly given? How do we encourage and ensure access to archives for future generations? Speakers may wish to address these questions, and we encourage original contributions on related topics. We invite speakers who engage with Pacific archival material as practitioners, researchers, teachers or artists, and particularly encourage speakers based in Pacific Island communities.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Pacific Perspectives on War in the Pacific
Convenors: Jonathan Ritchie, Deakin University & Gregory Bablis, National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea
Email: jonathan.ritchie@deakin.edu.au
After more than seven decades, the devastating cataclysm of World War II continues to influence the contemporary Pacific world. From the rusting material lingering on beaches and in jungles, to the Pacific people whose lives were dramatically changed by contact with the many thousands of foreigners who arrived; from the geopolitical realignments that brought the ending of colonialism in some parts of the Pacific, but its further, and seemingly permanent, entrenchment in others; and in the ultimate desolation brought about by post-War nuclear testing: the War’s impact surrounds us in the Pacific.
Our panel brings together presenters who have been engaging with the Pacific encounter with War. We welcome presentations that address a wide range of aspects of the War and its impact in the Pacific, and will be particularly interested to include presentations by indigenous Pacific people.
Number of papers in this session: 9
Panel Title: Gender and Land in the Pacific World
Convenors: Ryan Tucker Jones, University of Oregon, Felicity Barnes and Hannah Cutting-Jones, University of Auckland
Email: rtj@uoregon.edu
Gender and Land are two protean concepts in Pacific history, resonant both in deep indigenous histories and more recent histories of colonialism and post-colonialism. This panel interrogates the intersection of these categories as a way of recasting histories large and small across the Pacific, histories that take in environments, social movements, economics, empire, and more.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Filipino Labor and Settler Colonialism in the US Occupied Pacific Islands, 1898 – present
Lead Convenor: Kristin Oberiano, Harvard University
Email: oberiano@g.harvard.edu
This panel charts Filipino migration in Hawai’i and Guåhan (Guam) across the U.S. empire in the Pacific from the Philippine-American War to the present. Although Filipinos were prisoners of war, imported agricultural laborers, and working-class immigrants, they also participated in the process of settler colonialism, only reifying the loss of sovereignty and land of indigenous Kanaka Maoli and Chamoru peoples. By connecting the experiences of Filipino racialized labor and settler colonialism in Hawai’i and Guåhan, this panel explores cultural tensions, inter-ethnic solidarities, and healings in-progress between indigenous and Filipino communities against U.S. imperialism. Panelists will present four case studies that range from Filipino revolutionaries’ incarceration in Asan, Ilokano sakadas from ‘Ōla‘a, Filipino military laborers in post-World War II Guåhan, and working-class boys of color from Kalihi. Together, these projects posit the possibilities of collective liberation for both settlers of color and indigenous peoples in Hawai’i and Guåhan.
Invited Speakers Only. This panel is closed to paper submissions.
Panel Title: Royal Exchanges in Oceania: Nineteenth-century gifts, twenty-first century returns
Convenors: Gaye Sculthorpe, the British Museum & Daniel Simpson, Royal Holoway
Email: GSculthorpe@britishmuseum.org
Historians of British exploration in Oceania increasingly seek to understand intercultural encounters from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples present. Recent and considerable progress has been made through critical readings of primary source texts. Much could also be said, however, about the roles played by objects in these same meetings. Often missed in studies of theft, ‘loot’, and anthropological collecting, the symbolic and mediatory functions of gifts given and received reflect uniquely upon how each party viewed and understood the other. In the postcolonial present, the very same objects often continue to stimulate and to shape the relationship between Britain and Oceania. Taking royalty as its theme, this panel seeks to understand the process of how and why objects arrived in Britain as various forms of royal ‘gifts’. Of particular interest are gifts intended for royalty, and objects brought by ‘royals’ or people of high status from the Pacific. We ask how British and Indigenous concepts of royalty were variously translated, and thus in what ways gift-giving was understood as an exchange or appeal between nations, as well as between individuals. What do these nineteenth-century gifts mean today for the peoples of the Pacific, and what if anything might be expected in return in the twenty-first century?
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Reforming colonialism and doing or thinking “decolonisation” in the francophone Pacific, 1929-56
Convenors: Isabelle Merle, CREDO, Marseille & Adrian Muckle, Victoria University of Wellington
Email: adrian.muckle@vuw.ac.nz
The last decade and more has seen renewed attention focussed on the decolonisation of Melanesia and Oceania more generally. Along with greater attention to pre-1945 developments and the immediate post-war decade, there have been calls to refocus on people rather than territory as well as the local “doing” of independence or decolonisation; to examine trans-national and lateral connections, networks and mobilities; to be less gender blind; to consider the role of regional/global Christian institutions or clergy; to pay attention to place in the workings of local/area councils; etc. While developments in the francophone Pacific have not been entirely neglected, the overwhelming focus remains on the period following the extension of citizenship in 1946 and relatively little attention has been paid to continuities with the policies, experiences and practices of the inter-war era. This panel calls on scholars of the francophone Pacific to propose papers examining the decades on either side of WW2 that encompass the colonial reformism of the 1930s, wartime transformations and, post-1945, the end of the indigénat (in New Caledonia) and the accession to citizenship (in New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna).
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Ethnography and Religious Conversion in the Seventeenth Century Philippines
Convenors: Stephanie Mawson, Sebestian Kroupa, University of Cambridge & Natalie Cobo, University of Oxford
Email: sjm277@cam.ac.uk
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish missionaries began the process of evangelising and converting Philippine communities to Christianity. In the process they produced a wealth of ethnographic materials, from accounts of pre-hispanic origin myths to dictionaries of indigenous languages. These sources have allowed historians to recount in detail the rich cultural tapestry of the Philippines at the point of European contact and have also proved important for anthropologists and historical archaeologists. This panel will consider the place ethnographic sources within the historiography of the seventeenth century, focusing on the question of Christian conversion.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Health and Labour After the Pacific War: Pacific Islanders and Medical Infrastructure
Convenors: Sandra Widmer, York University, Ontario & Christine Winter, Flinders University of South Australia
Email: swidmer@yorku.ca
Providing biomedical health care and conducting health research requires particular infrastructures. In this respect, the post war era was marked by particular trends in “magic bullets” and technological fixes for global problems of hunger, clean water and infectious disease to achieve “development”. This panel looks at what contexts in the Pacific region can complicate this history. The post-war era also marked changes in economies and forms of labour and training for Pacific islanders. This panel will look at the work needed for post-war health infrastructure in a way that shows the overlap between labour history and biomedical care/medical research history. The panel asserts Pacific islanders’ centrality in the topic, by looking at what historically specific kinds of labour or care relationships were needed in the development of infrastructure and biomedicine. We welcome papers on (but not limited to) the following topics: Post-war directions of research and health; Pacific Islander training and labour to build and operate infrastructures; health Infrastructures and nation building and/or decolonization; the transition from military to civilian health services; labour mobility, quarantine and health monitoring.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Transnational Hawai‘i: Sovereignties within and Beyond the Islands
Lead Convenors: Benjamin Madley, University of California, Los Angeles & Hannah Cutting-Jones, University of Oregon
Email: madley@ucla.edu
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ka Pae ‘Āina ‘o Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian Archipelago) became a nexus in a complex web of trade and migration routes crisscrossing the Pacific World. These circuits brought outsiders to Hawai‘i from around the globe. Their arrival transformed the discourses, politics, and environmental contours of Hawaiian sovereignty. At the same time, these circuits carried Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) to distant points within and beyond the Pacific Ocean region. Their migrations profoundly transformed Hawai‘i, its sovereignty, and the many regions Kānaka Maoli people visited and chose to call home. This panel will explore the histories of outsiders in Hawai‘i and Kānaka Maoli beyond the islands.
Invited speakers only. This panel is closed to paper submissions.
Panel Title: Pitcairn Island’s ‘Strangers’: ‘Placing’ Insiders, Outsiders, and the Microcosmic in Pacific Language and History
Conveners: Tillman Nechtman, Skidmore College, Adrian Young, Denison University & Joshua Nash, Aarhus Institute of Advance Studies
Email: tnechtma@skidmore.edu
Tiny Pitcairn Island has been home to an isolated and insulated community since its settlement by the mutineers from the Bounty in 1790. The papers of this panel interrogate the ways that the Pitcairn community has come to communicate not only internally with itself but also with the outside world. Studying history, language, and the production of knowledge, these papers take Pitcairn as a microcosmic subject to reflect on the interaction between ideas of “insiders,” “outsiders,” and “strangers” in the Pacific more broadly.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: (En)Gendering Micronesian Pasts: Re-envisioning Gender Histories in the Not-So-Tiny ‘Tiny Islands’
Conveners: James Perez Viernes, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa & Sharleen Santos-Bamba, University of Guam
Email: jamesv@hawaii.edu
This panel features recent and ongoing works that expand and challenge existing perspectives and historiographies relevant to gender in Micronesian pasts. The panel especially welcomes works that unveil and celebrate diverse gendered identities and experiences that manifest in complex indigenous forms of agency against an ongoing backdrop of colonial interventions and intrusions in what has been coined the “American Pacific.” Panel conveners invite submissions that advance efforts to showcase the complex interplay between varied gendered experiences that reflect layered and fluid responses within the rich and composite pasts unique to the corner of the Pacific called Micronesia, or the “tiny islands.” The panel challenges this misnomer through the lens of gender as a valuable and provocative theoretical posture through which the so called ‘tiny islands’ can be understood as a vast island world where women, men, and others continue to exercise myriad forms of transformative agency to shape and reshape political, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and other spheres.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Silk Road Century? China’s Past, Present, and Future in Oceania
Conveners: Terence Wesley-Smith, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka & Henryk Szadziewski, University of Hawai`i at Manoa
Email: twsmith@hawaii.edu
The rise of China is undoubtedly one of the most important global developments of recent decades and will continue to be a major force for change in 21st Century. This panel will explore China’s long history of engagement with the Pacific Islands region with a particular focus on the extraordinary rise of its economic and political influence in Oceania since about 2006. Papers will be invited on topics that explore China’s influence on migration and diaspora; changing geopolitics; trade, aid, and development; regional security; cultural diplomacy and soft power influence.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Blurring boundaries: Challenging regional constructions in histories of Pacific art & culture
Conveners: Andy Mills, University of Glasgow & Billie Lythberg, University of Auckland
Email: Andrew.Mills@glasgow.ac.uk
Historical narratives of art and culture in the Pacific have frequently been written within imposed Western geographical, ethnographic or political frameworks. Such histories have been further shaped by ethno-geographical distinctions such as Western and Central Polynesia, hybrid pseudo-regions like Outlier Polynesia and Para-Micronesia, and by the perpetually ‘unclassifiable’ nature of Fiji, the Bismarck Archipelago and other landforms. As historians of the Pacific strive to explore and integrate community worldviews within historical narratives, these imagined spatial identities are of questionable relevance and viability. At the same time, recent archaeological evidence has revealed trade networks spanning vast areas of the Pacific. While these classificatory systems have generated useful frameworks for understanding the Pacific’s historical interaction spheres, transnational and trans-regional interactions have often been relegated to minor footnotes in national histories of one country or another, going unknown elsewhere. We invite speakers working with material and immaterial culture, to explore whether a more fluid view of place and movement can offer new perspectives that challenge the familiar.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: Materiality, Collecting, and the Praxis of Encounters
Lead Convenor: Bronwen Douglas, Australian National University
Email: bronwen.douglas@anu.edu.au
This panel brings together a triple focus: (1) on the concept of ‘materiality’ as an important recent theme in social science scholarship, including history; (2) on ‘collecting’ as situated processes of exchange involving diverse Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors, spanning not only objects but knowledge materialized in varied genres—written, drawn, mapped, photographed, recorded, performed, remembered; (3) and on ‘encounters’ between people and places as embodied loci for the exchange and collection of things and knowledge. Papers will reflect on the importance of systematic thinking about materiality for creative, critical investigation within and across disciplines. They will address aspects of the agency and power of people, places, things, and their material representations or manifestations. They will show the local-global significance of careful consideration and comparison of historical particularities, precisely located in space and time.
Number of papers in this session: 5
Panel Title: The Japanese Pacific, 1868-1945
Lead Convener: Martin Dusinberre, University of Zurich
Email: martin.dusinberre@hist.uzh.ch
In ways that would have been unimaginable fifty years earlier, Japan was by 1900 a Pacific nation. Japanese intellectuals proclaimed a ‘Pacific age’; labourers migrated to Hawai‘i, the US West Coast, Micronesia, Australia and Latin America; pearlers and whalers and traders expanded their operations to new markets; and shipping companies developed new routes. This panel locates the significance of the Pacific as an historical arena for Japan within a longer history of Japanese maritime engagement and later imperial expansion. Drawing on new and unpublished scholarship in Japan, Europe and North America, the panel aims to rethink the hyphen at the heart of the Asia-Pacific region.
Number of papers in this session: 4
Panel Title: Teaching Pacific History: Innovations & Challenges
Convener: Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano & Nicholas Halter, University of the South Pacific, Fiji
Email: morgan.tuimalealiifano@usp.ac.fj
What is the state of Pacific History teaching across the region? How are teachers tackling present challenges in the classroom environment? What innovative strategies are being employed to update Pacific History curriculums and pedagogy? What trends characterise Pacific History education today and what does the future hold? This panel builds on the successful 2016 Guam panel ‘Teaching Pacific History – Or, How to Absorb New Themes and Paradigms’.
Number of papers in this session: 5