Polyface in Paradise: Exploring the Politics of Race, Gender, and Place

Abstract

This article arises from critical conversations about the politics of place that began in 2015 at the "Worlding Oceania: Christianities, Commodities and Gendered Persons in the Pacific" conference in Canberra, Australia. At the conference, anthropologist Kalissa Alexeyeff and Samoan artist Yuki Kihara both spoke on their research, which deals with overlapping themes of art, colonial imaginaries, gender, and representation. Both discussed the trope of Pacific paradise in Western and Pacific imaginaries. Alexeyeff talked about how images of tropical paradise were used to decorate homes of Cook Islanders living in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These included poster-sized pictures of sandy, palm tree-lined beaches and tourist-promotion leaflets of smiling Polynesian dancing girls. The utilization of these images, she argued, enacted a repossession or repurposing of the paradise trope to express longing and nostalgia for home back in the Cook Islands (Alexeyeff 2016). Kihara spoke about her photographic series, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Kihara 2013), in which she dresses in Victorian mourning wear and poses at iconic sites in Sāmoa. One image in the series is of a paradisiacal tourist beach. Kihara discussed how her Victorian figure "haunts" this beach, grieving for local lives lost at this spot in 2009 as the result of Tsunami Galu Afi. Kihara's work repossesses the generic and timeless tourist paradise in order to thoroughly embed it in the social-historical memories of a particular landscape. This conference experience led the authors to further collaborative engagements that took place across countries, at various academic conferences and art exhibitions, and through co-participation in the Master of Development Studies program at the National University of Samoa in 2016. We first discussed Kihara's work Der Papālagi, the subject of this article, in Melbourne in 2016. The photographs that comprise this work

The audacity of the ocean: Gendered politics of positionality in the Pacific

“…Throughout the contemporary Pacific, notions of indigeneity are emerging as evidence of celebrated resistance to post‐colonial development anxieties. These relationships circulate around popular culture, and imaginaries of Pacific paradise (Tamaira & Fonoti, 2018), but also and equally problematically around the challenges of entangled ideologies of gender, race and religion (Alexeyeff & Kihara, 2018; Schoeffel et al ., 2018; Hattori, 2018). And it is here that long‐standing intolerances especially around gender and race also surface.…”

Yuki Kihara's Paradise Camp as a potential Fa’afafine museum: Fabulous cohabitation in a shared world

“… 23. Kihara has an ongoing interest in the question of ethnic drag, and of questioning “the ethical boundaries between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation” (2018: 168) across Oceania and Europe. See Alexeyeff and Kihara (2018). She explores this problematic crossing in works including the series Der Papālagi (The White Man) (2016) and Going Native (2019/2022).…”