Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. vi, 305 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$78.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7445-2.
For the reader to navigate the broad range of material presented in this book it is worth being reminded that, for many Pacific Islanders, “the ocean has always presented not an obstacle but a necessary avenue of travel and opportunity” (93). The vastness in the diversity of material presented in this book is a representation of this “one-third of the globe” (3) that has demanded from researchers an “interdisciplinarity” understood to be “a particularly rich seam in Pacific scholarship” (4). This diversity is not an obstacle, but a necessary avenue of intellectual travel and opportunity for broader understanding across an endlessly rewarding subject. If this book has a singular project, it is in an underlying search for ways in which history can be helpful. Recognizing that much of the Pacific is facing a state of existential emergency, the book opens with an appeal for history to “offer us new insights for a world in crisis” (2), and ends by reminding the reader of Alice Te Punga Somerville’s ethical questions of “which histories do we tell, and which futures do we imagine?” (289). Thus the book is concerned with how history is about the future, and how the project of creating desired futures for the Pacific needs the discipline of history to keep it afloat.
The book is divided into four sections, each as diverse as the chapters that are the sum of its parts. Each part is perhaps visited as an island of scholarship as the reader is ably navigated on a scholarly cruise across time, subject, and terrain. The first is “Genealogies of the Future,” where contested approaches to climate change follow the relationship between historical knowledge and genetic science, relationships between history and genealogy, and the extraordinary networks of connection that are the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Margaret Jolly’s superb analysis of Western scientific dialogue around climate change and its dependency on a constructed nature/culture divide shows how truncated are these understandings without the incorporation of Pacific indigenous historicities and epistemologies. Matt Matsuda provides an excellent account of the power and important limitations of DNA analysis in mapping the deeper histories of Pacific movement. Alice Te Punga Somerville examines genealogy “as a metaphor for history” (70) and provides the book with its ethical framework in reminding us that both history and the future, are about choice. David Hanlon’s fascinating account of FSM as “much older exchange networks, voyaging communities, and contact zones” (81) that are imperfectly expressed as the modern nation-state demonstrates the ways in which deeper histories have intersected with the contemporary conceit of FSM as little more than a post-colonial construction.
The second section, “Transit Futures,” contains two chapters broadly around the theme of transit through the Pacific. Frances Steel’s history of modern shipping and air travel globalizes our intellectual journey and is as unrestrained in scope as the revolution in human mobility has allowed us to become. Bronwen Douglas takes us into the world of maps—maps of the Pacific world with a beautiful account of naming, race creation, and the construction of teleologies, regions, and borders that are mirrored even in the “well-patrolled boundaries” (147) of university departments.
The third section, “Asian Pacifics,” contains two chapters that examine the history of South Asian and Cantonese migration and settlement in and through the Pacific. Tony Ballantyne does a remarkable job of revealing the “multiplicity of India’s Pacifics” (160) and the “spur” to the racist migration policies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. Henry Yu offers an illuminating insight into kinship and dialect bases for Cantonese networks across the Pacific, and the “ferocious commitment of Cantonese migrants to the future” (190) in driving a Cantonese Pacific that has echoed through to the present day.
In the fourth and final section, “Weedy Historicities,” multiple lines of historicity are woven through the Pacific in search of ways to comprehend how the Pacific and its peoples have understood themselves, and have been understood by others. Race is a common theme in these four chapters, both for indigenous constructions and colonial impositions of racial identity. Barbara Brookes examines the 19th century decline in the Māori population and investigates two “routes of return of Māori from possible extinction” (208), one based on the ancestral Māori origin place of Hawaiki, and the other on the implementation of a New Zealand government health initiative. Christine Manganaro reveals how sociologists from the University of Chicago set about teaching a teleological account of Hawaiian history to students at the University of Hawai‘i in order to prepare them for “a specific future of American cultural assimilation” (225). Assimilationist historicity has instead given way to “a genealogical approach to vernacular history” (235) that seeks to decolonize the colonial project of Americanization. Michael Stevens enlightens us to an anti-racist missionary project of racial amalgamation in New Zealand that was based on the assumption of “the unity of man,” and another example of a future that was impossible to predict. Warwick Anderson gives us the “weedy historicities” (264) that have invaded the Marquesas via the work of Harry Shapiro and Greg Denning, and offers a salutary lesson for historians everywhere: “we need to learn to accept life, in all its forms and temporalities and mixtures … and thus fabricate new, vernacular futures” (274).
Is Pacific Futures helpful for the survival of much of the Pacific in this teleological age of climate change? In this present that has all but run out of hope for the future, one can imagine escaping to a beautiful Pacific island location to seek isolation from a collapsing global civilization, with a few selected books to accompany the remaining years. The reader could do worse than to include Pacific Futures in that final list.
Michael Main
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia