Pasifika Black

Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World

Quito Swan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781479885084
• eBook ISBN: 9781479867929
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: Social Sciences

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner

A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific's Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa's Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, West Papua's Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia's Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will 'Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Garvey’s Caveat: Pan-Africanism and the Black Pacific
• 2. Negroids of the Pacific: West Papua, Senegal, and Negritude
• 3. Oodgeroo Noonuccal: Black Women’s Internationalism in Australia
• 4. Nilaidat: Black Power in Papua New Guinea
• 5. Melanesia’s Way
• 6. Black Pacific Festivals: FESTAC, Nigeria, and Oceania
• 7. Povai: Fiji, Pacific Women, and a Nuclear Free Pacific
• 8. 1878: Black Liberation in Kanaky
• 9. One Single Front against Imperialism: Libya, New Caledonia, and Oceania
• 10. Blacks Must Rule Vanuatu
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author