Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World

A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans

Despite its small landmass in relation to other continents, Oceania has been the site of large-scale political struggles and immensely significant historical processes. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of anti-colonial movements in this understudied region, exploring how Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections in their fight for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse fights against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists the many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific's Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa's Albert Wendt, anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, West Papua's Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia's D憨?Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will'Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.