Pasifika Black : Oceania, anti-colonialism, and the African world

"Pasifika Black details how liberation struggles in Oceania engaged Black internationalism in their fights against French, British, Indonesia, and Australian colonialisms. It explores how these diverse and uneven efforts informed political movements across the Black Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Ocean worlds, linking Black metropoles across Suva, Brisbane, Harlem (s), Paris, Lagos, Tripoli and Dakar. Its protagonists include playwrights, visual artists, environmental activists, martyrs, religious leaders, musicians, revolutionaries, students, and poets who globally carried the banners, books and bibles of Black Power, Negritude, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, Black liberation theology, Pan-Africanism and the Pacific Women's Conference. Pasifika Black puts Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal's 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria's Wole Soyinke, Samoa's Albert Wendt, Fiji's Amelia Rokotuivuna, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, West Papua's, Negritude's Aimé Césaire, Kanak leader Dewe Gorodey and Polynesian Panther Will. Based on research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Britain and the United States, the book's archival arsenal includes photographs, government surveillance, diaries, audio-visuals, revolutionary print media, artwork, novels, oral traditions, songs, and ephemera. It maps our conceptually gendered geographies of the women, men, and imaginations of Black internationalism into the universities, reservations, nakamals, plantations, villages, harbors, churches, concrete jungles and European imagined boundaries of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. 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"--