Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer. As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human impact on the environment.

Essential single-volume history of the Pacific region and the global interactions which define it.

An exploration of food, ingestion, and digestion in the emerging field of the metabolic arts. Food appears everywhere in the arts. But what happens after viewers carry food away in the intestinal networks activated by social practice art, the same way digestion turns food into a body? Exploring the emerging field of metabolic arts, After Eating claims digestion and metabolism as key cultural, creative, and political processes that demand attention. Taking an artist-centered approach to nutrition, Lindsay Kelley cultivates a neglected middle ground between the everyday and the scientific, using metabolism as a lens through which to read and write about art. Divided into two parts and full of playful chapter titles such as “Food Babies” and “Poop Circus,” After Eating investigates multiple facets of the sociocultural implications of body image and body process in body art from the 1970s to the present. By engaging the notion of “after” as an artistic homage or tribute, metabolism moves beyond the cell to transform into a method for responding to the most difficult cultural, philosophical, and political challenges of the contemporary moment. Metabolic reading rethinks feminist, queer, bioart, installation, and performance projects, providing artists, students, and teachers with new pathways into art theory.

This book explains how leaders in the Caribbean and Pacific regions balance the autonomy-viability dilemma of postcolonial statehood - that political self-determination is a hollow achievement unless it is accompanied by economic development - by practising statehood à la carte. Previous research has focused on the pursuit of decolonial self-determination through and above the nation state, via regionalism and internationalism, or by creating non-sovereign alternatives to it. This book looks at how communities have sought the same goals below the state, including via secession and devolution. Downsizing is typically portrayed as the antithesis of progressive, cosmopolitan internationalism and employed as evidence for the claim that the age of anticolonial self-determination has ended. In this book, Jack Corbett shows how these movements are animated by similar ideas and motivations that are rendered viable by the simultaneous pursuit of regional integration and forms of non-sovereignty. He argues that the à la carte pursuit of political and economic independence through, above, and below the state, and via non-sovereign alternatives to it, is a pragmatic response to the contradictions inherent to coloniality.

Volume II of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean focuses on the latest era of Pacific history, examining the period from 1800 to the present day. This volume discusses advances and emerging trends in the historiography of the colonial era, before outlining the main themes of the twentieth century when the idea of a Pacific-centred century emerged. It concludes by exploring how history and the past inform preparations for the emerging challenges of the future. These essays emphasise the importance of understanding how the postcolonial period shaped the modern Pacific and its historians.

A study of one imposter and his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean.

In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.