Indigenous Pacifics

Oceania is a region rich with vantage points for navigating local community struggles and global matters. Recognizing that histories of exchange within and beyond Oceania shape the lived experiences of Pacific Islanders, Indigenous Pacifics seeks to create a space for generative and sustained conversations between the independent and the still-occupied Pacific Islands, between Natives and non-Natives, between academics, artists, activists and other cultural knowledge producers, between the Pacific and other regions. In so doing, this series provokes audiences to think anew and differently about issues of decolonization, sovereignty, nationhood, language revitalization, militarization, development, resource management, diaspora, and varied forms of Indigenous cultural and political resurgence.

Indigenous Pacifics values the situated specificities of Indigenous Pacific contexts and concerns, while also attending to broader dynamics of power, knowledge and movement. The series presents projects that consider cultural politics and the politics of culture, where “politics” is understood to encompass the everyday, the intimate, the economic and the popular, as well as formal institutions of governance and policy. Whereas Pacific and Native studies have historically focused on relationships between colonizers and colonized, this series also encourages nuanced engagement with inter-Pacific relationships of collaboration and contestation. The editors invite projects that productively place historical and contemporary Pacific experiences of cultural production and political mobilization into conversation.

Indigenous Pacifics aims to open new pathways in thought and practice for Oceanic epistemologies, methodologies and relationships, particularly through books that emerge from and take seriously the concerns of Indigenous and diasporic islander communities. This interdisciplinary series will draw from fields such as: history, anthropology, cultural studies, political science, literature, environmental studies, sociology, gender studies, performance studies, Pacific Studies, and Native studies (such as Hawaiian, Māori, and Chamorro studies). The editors encourage projects that push the boundaries of and explore the productive tensions between such disciplines.

Series editors:

Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua is a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She specializes in Hawaiian and Indigenous politics. Noelani is the author of The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minnesota, 2013). She has published articles in several scholarly journals related to Hawaiian, Indigenous and political studies, and she has contributed chapters to internationally peer-reviewed, Indigenous studies anthologies such as Indian Subjects: New Directions in the History of Indigenous Education (School for Advanced Research Press, 2014) and Critical Indigenous Studies in the First World: Deliberations, Debates and Dilemmas in Theory and Practice (University of Arizona Press, in press). Noelani is the co-editor of two recent books: The Value of Hawaiʻi, 2: Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions (UH Press, 2014) and A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (Duke, 2014). She also serves on the editorial boards of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, the Journal of Narrative Politics, and the Hawaiʻinuiākea monograph series. As a complement to her academic work, Noelani is committed to community-building and social justice work in Hawaiʻi and the broader Pacific region.

April K. Henderson is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work appears in The Contemporary Pacific, New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, Pacific Studies, the edited collection The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, and she co-edited the special issue “Dance, Gender and the Moving Body in Oceania” for Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (Australian National University E-Press). She is a member of the editorial board of Popular Communication: the International Journal of Media and Culture (Taylor & Francis) and served as Reviews Editor (Pacific) for Asia Pacific Viewpoint (Wiley-Blackwell) from 2009–2013.