The Contemporary Pacific

There has not been much sustained discussion about connections among African and diasporic African peoples and Pacific Islanders. The most pronounced attention has gone to mobilizations of radical tactics and political styles associated with Black Power and Black Consciousness by Pacific activists across the region from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, where Robbie Shilliam sets The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections, adaptations of Africana thought by Pacific Islanders have been given a largely sociopolitical explanation: young urban Māori and immigrant Islander communities from former New Zealand colonies, displaced from the land and disaffected by the state, were temporarily drawn to compare their situations with those of urban African Americans and Black South Africans.

In The Black Pacific, Shilliam works within, around, beneath, and in “ways otherwise” (29) to this delimiting, period-bound narrative; in particular, he counters the tendency to compare Black and Indigenous peoples in terms of their situations vis-à-vis colonialism or neocolonial commodity culture rather than to reactivate “sideways” legacies of their connections to each other. The philosophical negation within Eurocentric [End Page 499] social thought of both “the Children of Legba” (Africana peoples, including the diaspora) and “the Children of Tāne/Māui” (Polynesians, and by inference all Pasifika peoples), he argues, has obscured their “rich” and “deep relationality” across times and places.

To demonstrate how retrieving a durable history of Africana/Pasifika relations might provide a spiritual “compass” and “energy store” going forward, Shilliam invites the reader to retrace key moments and movements (including the Springbok protests and the Black Women’s Movement) and to “walk with” community activists, artists, musicians, and nineteenth-century Māori prophets, whose thought and activism are concisely portrayed and contextualized. The encounters of peoples and ideas narrated in The Black Pacific are organized not chronologically but “along degrees of intensity” (149); in this, the structure of the chapters doubles the “grounding” process among Pasifika and Africana peoples that for Shilliam deepens as it moves from “comparativism” to “identification” to “inhabitation” to “enfolding.” Further, in quoting extensively from interviews, often without breaking the flow of the text with attributions, and through referencing his own participant observations, Shilliam performs how the book itself enfolds out of groundings among Pasifika, Africana, and Pākehā (white New Zealander) activists.

In chapter 1—which fuses ideas from Walter Rodney, Walter Mignolio, and “RasTafari” thinkers—Shilliam describes “grounding” as a form of “reasoning” that retrieves “deep relation,” a “decolonial science” set against a “colonial science” that segregates, categorizes, and “produces” static knowledge rather than “cultivating” co-creative thought. Chapter 2 connects the recovery of “living knowledge traditions” (7) to extending a global anticolonial infrastructure in which Black Power articulates with the drive for mana motuhake (Māori sovereignty, self-determination). One aim of The Black Pacific is to rebind Black diasporic and indigenous peoples by winding back through colonial histories to “uncolonized spiritual hinterlands” (136), where the Children of Legba and Tāne/Māui “walk together.” The strong claims that emerge out of this integrative vision (in which the RasTa-fari “I-n-I” resonates with the Māori “tātou tātou,” meaning “already part of oneself” [149]) are that Māori can co-inhabit with Blackness (which at times extends to include all sufferers of white colonial racism) without dis-identification from Māoridom and that Black diasporic peoples, through alliance with movements for indigenous self-determination, can discover more ethically and culturally grounded analytics for contesting settler colonial and oppressive global structures.

Shilliam’s discussion of activist groups Ngā Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panther Movement (ppm) in chapter 3 shows how the localization of Black Panther strategies—the ppm developed its own ten-point community program and “pig patrol” (Police Investigation Group)—moved beyond the comparative and through a contentious period of...