Rapa Nui, Isla Histórica: Una Lectura De La Rosa Separada De Pablo Neruda

In the mad rush toward extinction of life that characterizes the past seventy-five years, Oceania has always been on the front lines. After having been used as laboratories on which to experiment with radioactive weapons of mass destruction, these islands are now being used by overindustrialized countries as carbon dumping-sites. Yet despite the repeated assaults of nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific peoples continue to asserting the vitality of Pacific cultures and languages in the ever-regenerating Pacific seascape. This introduction explores Pacific (post)apocalyptic stories of multigenerational resistance to imperial biopolitical assaults, from 1945 antinuclear songs in 'Uvea (Wallis) to contemporary sci-fi about artificial islands in Ma'ohi Nui (French Polynesia). By retracing how customary Indigenous orature and visual technologies persist and flourish in post-1945 creative discourse, the introduction reaffirms the strength of Pacific cultures in the face of past, future, and ongoing apocalypses.

Introduction

2024

Isletism

2024

The first chapter explores “Isletism,” the ideology that underpins the ongoing assault on Pacific peoples. For centuries, Westerners have seen the Pacific Islands as isolated islets outside modern history. Imagining the tropical Island as marooned at the earliest stage of a supposedly unilinear path to “progress,” Western narratives have denied Oceanians both the right to history and the right to a future. Indigenous people were contaminated with viruses and irradiated by nuclear bombs because they were considered outside the realm of humanity and doomed to disappear. Today, the very same imperial obliviousness structures Western nations' responses to the climate crisis, which ranges from compassionate apathy to downright indifference. While such ideological representations are pervasive among foreign writers, I highlight that they occur even in the works of progressive intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda, who perpetuates Isletist tropes about Oceanians' ahistoricity even in the age of the atom.

Oceanitude

2024

This chapter presents the counterhegemonic ideology to Isletism: “Oceanitude.” Coined in 2015 by ni-Vanuatu novelist Paul Tavo, Oceanitude is a literary, philosophical, and political current theorizing Pacific collective identity in times of nuclear imperialism and carbon imperialism. This philosophy challenges the Western-led glorification of Cartesianism, or the belief that (some hu)man(s) can become master and possessor of nature. Philosophers of Oceanitude suggest that in the Pacific, modes of being in the world stem from the consciousness of sharing a genealogical relationship with the ocean, which can only be protected collectively. Inspired by the anti-Cartesian Black liberation movement known as Negritude, Oceanitude can create new solidarities across islands and oceans and illuminate current struggles such as the fight against settler desecration from the Black Atlantic to Mauna Kea.