Abstract: This area focuses on Pacific Islands centered concepts of Blackness, drawing from theories of Blackness, Africana Studies, Black-Indigenous relations, and concepts of Blackness within Pacific Islands worldviews, literatures, and literary theory. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, with the influence of African Diaspora movements and scholarship, movements centering on concepts of Blackness began to develop among Aboriginal and African Diaspora groups in the Pacific Islands. Blackness became an identity marker not only for African-Australians and African migrants, but also for Pacific Islanders including Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, South Sea Islanders, Māori people, and Indigenous people in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Since the 1990s, Aboriginal Australians have also begun to use the term “Blak” as a form of resistance to racialization.  This area asks questions such as: what connections exist between African Diaspora and Pacific Islands concepts of Blackness as an identity marker? how is Blackness marked as a spatial and temporal marker? and what discourses emerge between African Diaspora and Aboriginal Pacific Islander frameworks of Bla(c)kness.? Primary topics include historicization and theories of Black-Indigenous relations, Blackness as a metaphorical concept within ontological and literary works related to the Pacific Islands concept of pō, engagement between Pacific Islands scholars and African Diaspora scholars, including African-American scholars; the Pōpolo Project in Hawaiʻi, and Blackness within Indigenous scholarship in Australia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Aotearoa / New Zealand. Key scholars include Joyce Pualani Warren, Nitasha Sharma, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Teresia Teaiwa, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Jackie Huggins, Catrina Felton-Busch and Liz Flanagan, Melissa Lucashenko, Rosemary van den Berg, Jeanine Leane, Kaiya Aboagye, Yadira Perez Hazel, Sujatha Fernandes, Quito Swan, Guy Emerson Mount, Maile Arvin, and Robbie Shilliam.

Abstract: In this dissertation, I argue that Indigenous knowledge and resurgence, Black knowledge and Black futures, and connections between these generate paths away from toxic whiteness, anti-Blackness, and settler colonial nation-states. The refusal of toxic whiteness must not work to re-center whiteness. On the contrary, it is only through centering Indigenous and Black knowledge and the lived experiences of Black and Indigenous communities that it is possible to move beyond and away from toxic whiteness, toxic settler states, and toxic nationalism. Black and Indigenous communities have long histories of envisioning and enacting worlds beyond these toxic power relations.

Christina Sharpe refers to the everyday atmosphere of racism and anti-Blackness as “the weather” in her lyric essay collection In the Wake. Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, and other Indigenous scholar activists theorize and enact refusal of the settler colonial nation-state and paths toward Indigenous resurgence. In addition to close listening to the work of Sharpe, Simpson, and Coulthard, I also engage with works including the lyric essays of Saidiya Hartman and Tiffany Lethabo King, the work of Michelle M. Wright, and work by Kanaka Maoli scholar activists, particularly in forms of writing such as Kumu kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui's work in Voices of Fire and Brandy Nālani McDougall's work in Finding Meaning, as well as theorists of Blackness, Indigenous scholars, and academic and literary authors living and working in the intersections of Blackness and Indigeneity.