Building Links
- Reef Shark
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
RS: Introducing our Reef Shark Links page. These links are designed to help explorers of Oceanic art, literature, and thought, especially palangi readers who may have grown up outside Oceania's indigenous cultures. Keep an eye on the page as new links will be added regularly.
Many people live in Oceania without understanding the region. The majority of Pakeha New Zealanders and Caldoche New Caledonians, for example, are still living mentally in Europe. The Javanese settlers of West Papua have followed nineteenth century European colonists in importing alien toponyms and ideas, and repressing indigenous ideas as well as people. In nations like Tonga, an intolerant Protestantism has been assimilated all too well by many indigenous people, so that they have pulled down their own godhouses and abandoned artistic traditions like carving without coercion.
On the other hand, people living far from Oceania have taken aesthetic, political, and spiritual sustenance from the region. It was Oceanic carving and sculpture that inspired artists like Picasso, Giacometti, and Moore to modernise and revivify European art a century ago. The reports from early European visitors to islands like Tahiti helped inspire European radicals and ignite revolutions. Today the Melanesian Brotherhood tours the Anglican cathedrals of England, bringing distinctively Melanesian brands of music and theology to audiences long bored by European Christianity.
The nineteenth century radical Bakunin called Oceania a 'storehouse of human culture', preserving ways of thinking and acting and making that had been eroded or extinguished by the rise of capitalism and industrial society. That storehouse still stands today, despite a long and in some parts of the region continuing period of colonial rule.
These links are keys to rooms of the great storehouse.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376769237_Our_Sea_of_Islands
Epeli Hau'ofa's essay 'Our Sea of Islands' has for decades inspired both indigenous and palangi scholars and creatives. In language that often approaches poetry, Hau'ofa makes Oceania the centre rather than the margin of the world, and asserts a continuity between the ocean voyagers of ancient history and the mobile Pasifika of modernity.
https://www.melanesianway.org/
Along with Walter Lini in Vanuatu, Bernard Narokobi was the main theorist of Melanesian socialism. Influenced by the revolutionary wars against colonialism in Lusophone Africa, by their own struggles for independence in New Guinea and Vanuatu, and by the decolonised Marxism of the American Black Power movement, Narokobi and Lini insisted that traditional practices and institutions of Melanesian societies could be the basis for a form of development that avoided the signposts built by the US government and organisations like the International Monetary Fund. The curse of New Guinea's mineral wealth foiled Narokobi's plan for small-scale, village-based modernisation, but Vanuatu's huge cooperative sector, booming kava industry, and decentralised legal system all echo the ideas of Melanesian socialism.
Ralph Regenvanu is that rare thing: an intellectual-politician. In this fascinating interview with his fellow anthropologist Heidy Geismar, he details some of the ways he has tried to use his time in government to create a 'kastom ekonomi' in Vanuatu. Regenvanu echoes Narokobi and Lini in his belief that development can be built on traditional foundations.
Māori Mārx: Some Provisional Materials | Counterfutures
Marxists have often acted like missionaries in Oceania, promoting The Communist Manifesto and Capital like bibles and expecting local societies to resemble those of Europe. But there has always been a minority in Marxist movements that has been attuned to indigenous experiences and struggles, and that has seen the potential for alternatives to capitalism in local cultures. Marx himself became disillusioned with the European class, especially after the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, and turned in his final decade to the intensive study of societies on the fringes of capitalism. When Engels went into Marx's study after the great man's death, he found a copy of George Grey's study of Maori on his friend's desk.
In this meticulous essay Simon Barber shows how Marx had changed by the time of his death, and shows how Marx's very late writings can be related to Maori society.
“The Dawn of Everything”: David Wengrow & the Late David Graeber On a New History of Humanity
The late Dave Graeber's last book The Dawn of Everything has been enormously successful, and has helped popularise arguments that scholars and activists of Oceania have been making for many decades: that history does not consist of a series of inevitable 'stages' that societies must pass through, and that European history need not be a model for the rest of the world. This youtube clip introduces some of the key ideas in the book Graeber published with his comrade David Wengrow.
https://eyecontactmagazine.com/2018/04/the-shack-by-the-lagoon
Many Western theorists have claimed that the avant-garde is dead in the era of postmodernism and late capitalism. They haven't been to Nuku'alofa and encountered the Seleka Club, an outfit that might be compared to movements like Dadaism and Surrealism. The Selekarians' provocations have given them notoriety amongst some Tongans, but their art modernises an ancient tradition, admitting outside influences without being overwhelmed by them.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bima-satria-putra-anarchy-in-alifuru
Anarchists were at the forefront of the uprising against Indonesia's Javanese ruling class in 2025. But where many anarchists in societies like Australia and Aotearoa have recycled European ideas, clinging reverently to thinkers like Kropotkin and societies like revolutionary Catalan, the Indonesians have begun to draw inspiration from indigenous societies in their country's far west. Anarchy in Alifuru was written in prison by the anarchist anthropologist Bima; it shows how the Melanesian peoples of the southern Maluku Islands sustained a decentralised and egalitarian society for centuries, defending it against both Dutch and Javanese interlopers.
Wendy Pond is one of the great scholars of Oceanic culture. In this influential essay she translates and analyses several songs from Tonga's far northern islands. Pond reveals the sophistication of Tongan literature by showing how songwriters use heliaki, a technique which allows them to nest one meaning inside another.
In the sixteenth century the Polynesian settlers of Rekohu and Rangiaotea, or Chatham and Pitt Islands, made one of the most radical revolutions in history, abandoning both warfare and hierarchy. Moriori history is a priceless case study in human possibility, showing that hierarchy and violence are not inevitable parts of life. This is the website of the Hokotehi Trust, a body elected by Moriori.
https://sacred-texts.com/pac/lku/index.htm
The Kumulipo is one of the best preserved literary masterpieces of ancient Polynesia. Passed from generation to generation and using rhyme as a mnemonic device, the long poem gives an account of the natural world that includes one of the first theories of evolution. The poem's highly compressed lines and extensive use of puns can make it seem modern as well as ancient. Philosopher Michael Kioni Dudley's Man, Nature, and Gods is an excellent guide to the complex ideas embedded in the text.
🎙️ Episode 3: Dr. Lorenz Gonschor | A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania
German-born historian Lorenz Gonschor has lived for decades in the Pacific, and become an expert on anti-colonial movements. This interview with Gonschor draws on his book A Power in the World, about the nineteenth century Kingdom of Hawai'i. Societies like Hawai'i and the Waikato Kingdom can be considered countermodernities, where development and modernisation were pursued according to values and interests alien to those of Europe and America. Gonschor has emphasised the progressive nature of Hawai'i's constitution, and the nation's multicultural and multiracial nature.
https://www.publicfilms.works/
This is the website of Paul Janman, whose film Tongan Ark is one of the masterpieces of twenty-first century Oceanic art. Janman studied with the legendary Tongan polymath Futa Helu, and his film is both an introduction to Helu's thought and a look at the university he founded to bring Pacific and European thought together.
https://libcom.org/article/time-work-discipline-and-industrial-capitalism-e-p-thompson
EP Thompson's great essay 'Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism' shows how the 'clock time' of capitalism replaced older rhythms rooted in the seasons and in the nature of artisanal labour and peasant farming. Thompson meant to show what had happened in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, but his essay is extraordinarily useful as a guide to the contemporary Pacific. In many tropical Pacific societies pre-capitalist time persists, despite the best efforts of frustrated employers and economic advisers from the northern hemisphere. Clock time is profoundly unsuited to the human body and mind, which evolved to move in harmony with climates and natural environments, and the dramatically lower rate of problems like depression and anxiety in tropical Pacific societies has much to do with the weakness of clock time there.
https://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/08/against-space-and-time-crostopi.html
CROSTOPI—the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island—was a psychogeographic group founded by Paul Janman and Scott Hamilton in 2010. The group gained other members and staged a series of art shows, talks, and provocations. It was recently refounded as the Alternate Ministry of Culture for Aotearoa. In this manifesto CROSTOPI argues against the imposition of a pseudo-objective single sense of space on Aotearoa New Zealand.
Konai Helu Thaman helped create a new type of Pasifika poetry, writing in English in a confessional manner about her experiences and problems as an indigenous woman contending with both neo-colonialism and patriarchy. But Thaman is also an important scholar, and in this eloquent essay she kicks against both palangi and indigenous Tongan patriarchy.
https://marama.huma-num.fr/index.htm
Alexandre Francois is a French linguist who has been working for many years in northern Vanuatu, putting the region's dozens of languages and literatures onto paper. Francois regards the linguistic diversity of the region, and of Melanesia in general, as the byproduct of egalitarianism. Linguistic differences have been treasured, rather than repressed. No people has conquered its neighbours and imposed a tongue on them. Francois' work has been made possible by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, which has for decades been working to decolonise scholarship by training a network of fieldworkers who record the languages and kastom of their villages, and guide visiting researchers in the field.
Keep coming back here as more links will be added over time...
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