This is a preliminary bibliography on works related to Bla(c)kness in the Pacific / Oceania, based on a comprehensive exam in this area of study.
LynleyShimat Lys
This page CC-BY 4.0 International License
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.
Africana Studies / African Diaspora Studies – Books
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard University Press, 2003.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Duke University Press, 2003.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Slate, Nico, editor. Black Power Beyond Borders : The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Walker, Alice. Meridian. Harcourt, 1976.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.
Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Duke University Press, 2004.
---. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Africana Studies / African Diaspora Studies – Articles
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route (Prologue & Chapter 1 “Afrotopia” (3-48) 2007.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” In Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. 1993.
Blackness in the Pacific - Books
Horne, Gerald. The White Pacific: US imperialism and Black slavery in the South Seas after the civil war. University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Duke UP, 2008.
Majavu, Mandisi. Uncommodified Blackness: The African Male Experience in Australia and New Zealand. Springer, 2017.
Shilliam, Robbie. The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. Bloomsbury, 2015.
--- “The Polynesian Panthers and the Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, edited by Nico Slate, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 107-126.
Blackness in the Pacific - Journal Issues
Fernandes, Sujatha, and Jared Thomas, editors. Bla(c)kness in Australia, special issue of Transition, no. 126, 2018.
Jackson, Miles M. They Followed the Trade Winds: African Americans In Hawaii, special issue of Social Process in Hawaii, vol. 43, 2004.
Teaiwa, Teresia et. al. “Black and Blue in the Pacific.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2017, pp. 145-193.
Blackness in the Pacific - Articles
Arvin, Maile. “Possessions of Whiteness: Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness in the Pacific.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 2 June, 2014, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/possessions-of-whiteness-settler-colonialism-and-anti-blackness-in-the-pacific/. Accessed 17 January 2018.
Lucious, Bernard S. "In the Black Pacific: Testimonies of Vietnamese Afro-Amerasian Displacements." Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas. Ed. Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee. Rutgers UP, 2005, pp. 122-56.
Rokolekutu, Ponipate. “Heterogeneity, Race and Genealogical Connection of Spiritual Hinterlands: A Response to Robbie Shilliam's The Black Pacific.” Robbie Shilliam, 7 February, 2016, https://robbieshilliam.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/the-black-pacific-forum-critiques-responses/. Accessed 17 January, 2019.
Blackness in Hawaiʻi – Articles & Book Chapters
Enomoto, Joy. “Where will you be? Why Black Lives Matter in the Hawaiian Kingdom.” Ke Kaupu Hehi Ale, 1 February 2017, hehiale.wordpress.com. Accessed 17 January 2019.
Sharma, Nitasha Tamar. “The Racial Imperative: Rereading Hawai‘i’s History and Black- Hawaiian Relations through the Perspective of Black Residents.” Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i, edited by Rudy Guevarra, Camilla Fojas, and Nitasha Sharma, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018, pp. 117-141.
Sharma, Nitasha. “Pacific Revisions of Blackness: Blacks Address Race and Belonging in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 43-60.
Silva, Noenoe K. “The Queen of Hawaiʻi Raises Her Solemn Note of Protest.” Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism.Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 164-203.
Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai’i.” Amerasia Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 1–24.
Multiracial Identity – Books
Fozdar, Farida, and Kirsten McGavin. Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Routledge, 2017.
Fojas, Camilla et. al., editors. Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i. University of Hawaii Press, 2018.
Black-Indigenous Relations - Books
Coleman, Arica L. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. Indiana University Press, 2013.
Miles, Tiya. Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. University of California Press, 2006.
Reese, Linda W. Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890. Texas Tech University Press, 2013.
Sturm, Circe Dawn. Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. University of California Press, 2002.
Black-Indigenous Relations - Articles
Jackson, Shona N. “Humanity beyond the Regime of Labor: Antiblackness, Indigeneity, and the Legacy of Colonialism in the Caribbean" Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society. 2014.
Bla(c)kness in Australia / Aboriginal concepts
Grossman, Michele. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Melbourne University Press, 2003.
Lucashenko, Melissa. “Not Quite White in the Head.” Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006.
Majavu, Mandisi. Uncommodified Blackness: The African Male Experience in Australia and New Zealand. Springer, 2017.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations. University of Arizona Press, 2016.
---. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. University of Queensland Press, 2002.
---. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
[---. Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004.]
Van den Berg, Rosemary. Nyoongar People of Australia: Perspectives on Racism and Multiculturalism. Brill, 2002.
Wheeler, Belinda, editor. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. Camden House, 2013.
Wheeler, Belinda, and Jeanine Leane. “Gender in Purple Threads: An Interview with Jeanine Leane.” Hecate, vol. 40, no. 2, 2014, pp. 84-92.
Whittaker, Alison. Blakwork. Magabala, 2018.
---. Lemons in the Chicken Wire. Magabala, 2015.
Identity and Blackness in Melanesia & Oceania
Hereniko, Vilsoni and Rob Wilson, editors. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
Kabutaulaka, Tarcisius. “RePresenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian AlterNatives.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 27, no. 1, 2015, pp. 110-146.
Stella, Regis Tove. Imagining The Other: The Representation of The Papua New Guinean Subject. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Swan, Quito. "Black Power in Papua New Guinea." Black Perspectives via the African American History Society, 2017.
Selections from:
Borofsky, Robert, editor. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.
Teaiwa, Katerina Martina, editor. Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations Between People In The Pacific. Center for Pacific Islands Studies Occasional Paper 43, 2007.
Winduo, Steven Edmund. Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in Papua New Guinea. University of Papua New Guinea Press and Bookshop and Manui Publishers, 2012.
Blackness in Japan and Okinawa
Carter, Mitzi and Aina Hunter. “A Critical Review of Academic Perspectives on Blackness in Japan.” Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within, edited by Graburn, H. H. et al., Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 188-198.
Onishi, Yuichiro. “Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa.” The Presence of (Black) Liberation in Occupied Okinawa, NYU Press, 2013, pp. 138-182.