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False Divides
"While we may talk back to the empire, we can’t talk to each other."
Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is the great ocean continent. While it is common to understand the ocean as something that divides land, for those Indigenous to the Pacific or the Moana, it was traditionally a connector and an ancestor.
Imperialism in the Moana, however, created false divides between islands and separated their peoples. In this BWB Text, Lana Lopesi argues that globalising technologies and the adaptability of Moana peoples are now turning the ocean back into the unifying continent that it once was.
Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is the great ocean continent. While it is common to understand the ocean as something that divides land, for those Indigenous to the Pacific or the Moana, it was traditionally a connector and an ancestor.
Imperialism in the Moana, however, created false divides between islands and separated their peoples. In this BWB Text, Lana Lopesi argues that globalising technologies and the adaptability of Moana peoples are now turning the ocean back into the unifying continent that it once was.
Kindle Edition
Published September 10, 2018
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About the author
Lana Lopesi
7 books19 followersLana Lopesi is an author and critic based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Lana is the Editor-in-Chief for The Pantograph Punch, was Founding Editor of #500words and author of False Divides (2018).
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December 4, 2021
The predominant view of the Pacific Ocean – a massive expanse of otherwise empty sea peppered with occasional and discrete island nation-states – seems entirely common-sensical; we are, after all, a land dwelling species. Yet this is not the notion that Lana Lopesi invokes in the short, sharp and extremely illuminating exploration of networks and communication flows within and across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, to give that mass of water its Māori name. More telling, for those of us grounded in the outlooks built by European modernity at least, is that she labels this moana The Great Continent, and reminds us that the current nation states were determined, as with most of the world’s national borders, by contention and agreement between European (including North American) colonising and imperial powers. That is to say, the map of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is an imperialist map that denies the life ways of peoples indigenous to that region. In that Pasifika world, the Moana existence, the ocean does not divide, as the colonisers’ mapping suggests, but connects – and it is these connections that Lopesi explores.
Her view is one of mobility, of peoples who traded, courted, contested and lived between island groups, often over extremely long distances – relations that colonialism to a large degree closed down with its fantasies of territorial sovereignty, with its borders and with its new rules and codes of discipline and control. Colonialism, she notes, was not averse to population mobility – but on its terms as seen in the ferocity of the Peruvian slave trade in the 1860s that eviscerated Rapa Nui’s population, or the enslavement in all but name of ‘blackbirded’ indentured labourers in Australia around the turn of the 20th century or Indians transported to Fiji as indentured laburers, or in relatively relaxed admission of Pasifika peoples to Aotearoa New Zealand during the labour shortages of the 1960s, and more. There are two technological developments that Lopesi identifies as undermining those false divides of colonial li(n)es on maps – cheap air travel and, the focus of this discussion, access to the Internet. These two technologies allow Pasifika peoples to return in earnest to their commuting roots (and, as she implies in citing James Clifford, their routes).
Most of the discussion focuses on the digital Moana and, without romanticising the digital world or denying the extent of the digital divide across and within Moana peoples, she makes a powerful case for digital worlds as essential to the growth and sustenance of key aspects of Indigenous Moana ways. In doing so she links these networks into other Indigenous on-line worlds and practices. Even so, in her discussion of the digital Moana commuter world she highlights four key areas where on-line worlds and practices are having an impact. First, she looks at the maintenance and development of a reconnected collective, often by reconnecting descent groups, and often in ordinary and everyday ways but also in more distinct contexts. Here she gives an example of an online discussion with her grandmother about whether a plant seen in Taiwan is the same, or close to, one widely used in their Sāmoan worlds. Her second communication network is one that builds new diasporic publics, including professional networks that might often transcend geographical and well as professional divides, such as she suggests new links between artists, elders, critics and others scattered widely but working in interlinked forms and with similar knowledges. There is a real sense that these two forms of divide-rupture often involve different digital platforms.
Her third mode of on-line life centres of languages and culture maintenance, with the rise of ‘meme culture’ allowing an array of approaches and techniques from more obviously instructional forms to jokes, puns and ‘in-house’ language use. It is here, perhaps more than most, that she makes explicit the double edged sword that is Internet-land, where the dominance of English and a small number of other languages and social media and other platforms’ structural impediments to Indigenous languages (such as the difficulties in using diacritical marks and orthographies), undermines this language development and sustenance question. The fourth mode is where on-line activity sustains, overlaps with and builds into activities ‘in real life’ (IRL, as the acronym goes); here she cites some examples of cultural revival activities that rely on the identification of artefacts in dispersed museum collections.
Richly and subtly theorised, this discussion draws on Lopesi’s multiple positions – as Aotearoa born and raised in a Sāmoan social world, as an artist and critic, writer and commentator – to grant insight to and hints of a well networked everyday existence with overlapping digital and IRL existences, offering insights to the possibilities beyond the corporate. That said, she is also acutely aware of limits – of the already noted digital divide, of the problems of funding much of this work, of the differences with Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa’s reach and between its peoples; all this comes together in a way that points to cautiously optimistic new modes of commuting, grounded in ways of being the predate and survive colonial depredations and their false divides. This combination makes this a superb and invigorating peek behind the curtain. Highly recommended.
Her view is one of mobility, of peoples who traded, courted, contested and lived between island groups, often over extremely long distances – relations that colonialism to a large degree closed down with its fantasies of territorial sovereignty, with its borders and with its new rules and codes of discipline and control. Colonialism, she notes, was not averse to population mobility – but on its terms as seen in the ferocity of the Peruvian slave trade in the 1860s that eviscerated Rapa Nui’s population, or the enslavement in all but name of ‘blackbirded’ indentured labourers in Australia around the turn of the 20th century or Indians transported to Fiji as indentured laburers, or in relatively relaxed admission of Pasifika peoples to Aotearoa New Zealand during the labour shortages of the 1960s, and more. There are two technological developments that Lopesi identifies as undermining those false divides of colonial li(n)es on maps – cheap air travel and, the focus of this discussion, access to the Internet. These two technologies allow Pasifika peoples to return in earnest to their commuting roots (and, as she implies in citing James Clifford, their routes).
Most of the discussion focuses on the digital Moana and, without romanticising the digital world or denying the extent of the digital divide across and within Moana peoples, she makes a powerful case for digital worlds as essential to the growth and sustenance of key aspects of Indigenous Moana ways. In doing so she links these networks into other Indigenous on-line worlds and practices. Even so, in her discussion of the digital Moana commuter world she highlights four key areas where on-line worlds and practices are having an impact. First, she looks at the maintenance and development of a reconnected collective, often by reconnecting descent groups, and often in ordinary and everyday ways but also in more distinct contexts. Here she gives an example of an online discussion with her grandmother about whether a plant seen in Taiwan is the same, or close to, one widely used in their Sāmoan worlds. Her second communication network is one that builds new diasporic publics, including professional networks that might often transcend geographical and well as professional divides, such as she suggests new links between artists, elders, critics and others scattered widely but working in interlinked forms and with similar knowledges. There is a real sense that these two forms of divide-rupture often involve different digital platforms.
Her third mode of on-line life centres of languages and culture maintenance, with the rise of ‘meme culture’ allowing an array of approaches and techniques from more obviously instructional forms to jokes, puns and ‘in-house’ language use. It is here, perhaps more than most, that she makes explicit the double edged sword that is Internet-land, where the dominance of English and a small number of other languages and social media and other platforms’ structural impediments to Indigenous languages (such as the difficulties in using diacritical marks and orthographies), undermines this language development and sustenance question. The fourth mode is where on-line activity sustains, overlaps with and builds into activities ‘in real life’ (IRL, as the acronym goes); here she cites some examples of cultural revival activities that rely on the identification of artefacts in dispersed museum collections.
Richly and subtly theorised, this discussion draws on Lopesi’s multiple positions – as Aotearoa born and raised in a Sāmoan social world, as an artist and critic, writer and commentator – to grant insight to and hints of a well networked everyday existence with overlapping digital and IRL existences, offering insights to the possibilities beyond the corporate. That said, she is also acutely aware of limits – of the already noted digital divide, of the problems of funding much of this work, of the differences with Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa’s reach and between its peoples; all this comes together in a way that points to cautiously optimistic new modes of commuting, grounded in ways of being the predate and survive colonial depredations and their false divides. This combination makes this a superb and invigorating peek behind the curtain. Highly recommended.
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