Topics in the Contemporary Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. xxi, 150 pp. (B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780824889807.
Representations of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, centre on issues of violence and gang crime, often linking these phenomena to the expansion of informal squatter settlements. Changes to the urban landscape—represented strikingly by new luxury hotels and shopping malls; cleaner streets following the crackdown on public betelnut use; and pothole-free roads—remain overshadowed by the ways in which the poor are not yet fully segregated from the city’s better-off residents. Urban insecurity creates problems for Papua New Guinean women, already at high risk from violence. This short but dense book focuses on how the city’s changing profile impacts the relatively small segment of “educated and employed” Port Moresby women. It is a welcome contribution to the literature on gender and urbanization in the Global South, and a significant (if sometimes analytically thin) addition to the literature on class and social identities in PNG. Drawing on data collected for multiple research, film, and evaluation projects since 2006, Spark uses mixed methods to trace the dangers and possibilities of life in Port Moresby for professional women in a time of rapid urban transformation.
The introduction provides a concise history of Port Moresby and the racial and gender exclusions that shaped its growth during the colonial period. The chapter also sets out the parameters of class in PNG, situating the dilemmas faced by professional women within the framework of feminist geography and studies of urban development in the global south.
Chapter 1 jumps to an overview of film representations of Port Moresby, surveying a range of documentaries, feature films, and episodes of British television shows that used Port Moresby’s settlements as a background for sensationalistic depictions of violence. This chapter seemed to me to be the least well developed; while it helps illustrate how gender, class, and crime in Port Moresby are commonly depicted and problematized on film, the concluding analysis stops short at calling for better representations of the city and more inclusive filmmaking practices.
Chapters 2 through 4 form the vital core of the book, discussing the housing, mobility, and consumption practices of middle-class women in a gentrifying Port Moresby. Spark discusses educated women’s aspirations for tenure security, privacy, and freedom, as well as the impact of “overseas” living on their understandings of independence. Biographical profiles of women, some pseudonymous, some prominent and named, drive the narratives in chapters 2 and 4. Importantly, the chapters touch on the ongoing impact of racist exclusions that still see Papua New Guineans treated poorly at some Port Moresby venues catering to whites. Spark notes the lurking discomfort some women feel in exposing the less fortunate to the posher side of the city—one woman saying that she would not take her sisters to a chic café because “it would be like ‘opening them to a world they would never have again’” (81). Stories like these get at the intimate dilemmas that educated and employed Papua New Guineans often face. The poor are not strangers. They are sometimes close kin, and the expectation that individual successes will be shared among extended family are increasingly difficult to realize.
Chapter 5 focuses on Papua New Guinean women working in development and aid, and how the sector perpetuates colonialist and racist exclusions by keeping expatriates in management positions and through how the “expat bubble” shapes the geography of the city. The emphasis in this chapter on working relationships is especially welcome, as it shows how leadership, expertise, and social hierarchies are reproduced. It is in this chapter that Spark’s use of feminist geography is clearest and most convincing, as it links local hierarchies and ideologies to global forces.
The conclusion returns to a framing story Spark introduced in her prologue—that of the 2017 murder of journalist Rosalyn Evara by her husband. This story highlights the theme of the advantages granted to women by class and education, and to what extent they can overcome the disadvantages of gender in a patriarchal context. In PNG, as Spark notes in her introduction, national ideology casts educated women as culturally and even racially inauthentic, while their life choices are greatly expanded and improved. Poor and rural women are idealized as national symbols but have little choice in how to live their lives. Rosalyn Evara’s story shows the sometimes-tragic outcomes for both kinds of women in PNG, and the complicated politics of mourning women who die from gender-based violence.
I mentioned that I found some of the analysis of class in The New Port Moresby to be thin. I say this guardedly, acknowledging the importance of Spark’s contribution as a whole. She makes the provocative argument early in the text that “[g]iven that Moresby is typically constructed in relation to the problems of urbanization, it seems potentially more radical to focus on the diverse and sometimes liberating aspects of women’s experiences than it is to focus on disadvantage and the lives of those living in slums” (15). The experiences of the middle class are important to understand, and much coverage of urban poverty and gender-based violence in PNG could be improved by a better understanding of class identities and class relations. Throughout her book Spark critiques Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington’s Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), finding the “elitist” middle-class attitudes documented therein too “pessimistic.” Spark’s collaborators did not talk as nastily about the poor as Gewertz and Errington’s informants did. This, she suggests, might mean that social attitudes have changed, or that educated women today have sincere commitments to equity and social justice. In her discussion of homemaking practices, she writes, “I interpret middle-class women’s new living arrangements as reflecting a hybrid blend of middle-class values such as privacy and the ability to control who comes and goes from one’s home, with a commitment to others that remains an important part of being middle class in Melanesia” (45). The question that I would ask here, when talking about class, is: commitment to which others? When employed women choose, as they do, to share space and money with some relatives, under some circumstances, the contours of those decisions and their impact over time may tell us more about the workings of class than their stated attitudes and sentiments.
Barbara Andersen
Massey University, Auckland