Emerging from Empire? Decolonisation in the Pacific

Denoon, Donald (July 1997). Denoon, Donald (ed.). Emerging from Empire? Decolonisation in the Pacific. Proceedings of a Workshop at the Australian National University. Canberra: Australian National University Press. ISBN 0-7313-2885-7.

• Has attachment: File:K4UFY5TA.pdf

Abstract: These papers grew out of a workshop in the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the Australian National University in December 1996. A December workshop has become a regular mechanism for assembling Pacific historians, their affines and agnates, without the formality of registration, a secretariat - or much of a budget. Accordingly, we owe a great debt to the participants who came largely at their own expense or funded by their own institutions. We owe an equal debt to Maeve O'Collins and Mary Mortimer, for hosting the parties which allow the networking for which these events are best remembered.

Participation was greater than expected, so that the agenda became more formal than usual; yet ideas and propositions flowed from one session to another, in ways which these proceedings cannot capture. On the other hand we include three papers which complement those presented at the workshop. The scale and quality of the response reflects the fact that decolonisation has become salient again - its seeming completeness an illusion.

A minimal argument about the incompleteness of decolonisation points to the continuing saga of negotiations over the status of New Caledonia (Small, chapter 9), as well as France's other overseas territories in Polynesia and the Wallis and Futuna islands. Even with formal independence, sovereignty is sometimes hedged by formal limitations ('free association' with the ex-colonial power) in the former American Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Petersen, chapter 10; Statham, chapter 1 1) as well as in the Cook Islands and New Zealand's other territories. More broadly, the institutional and ideological inheritance of the colonial period continues to influence people's behaviour and forms of polity and economy, with profound consequences even for generations born long after independence. It is these issues which Kabataulaka and Bouma address in Solomon Islands (chapters 20 and 21) and Nadile for Papua New Guinea (chapter 22). They propose the urgent need for intellectual decolonisation, partly through closer attention to school and university curricula. A strategy on these lines was attempted by Ulli and Georgina Beier in the 1970s (Denoon, chapter 24), and Lacey (chapter 23) describes a much longer-term venture in the Enga province of Papua new Guinea. By contrast, resource companies and other agencies, who employ personnel with backgrounds in colonial administration, tend to perpetuate some of the values and procedures of an earlier era (Ballard and Banks, chapter 1 9). Manifestly the struggles to create an autonomous intelligentsia, and education systems for post-colonial societies are neither easy nor certain in their outcomes. Even where an independent government with ample financial resources attempts to undo the damage of a predatory colonialism (Pollock, chapter 12), it is difficult to avoid dependence upon the technical expertise - and the value systems - of former colonial powers. A more radical critique goes beyond colonialism as residual, and finds signs of recolonisation in much of the third world, and especially in the Pacific....

Extra details:

MAG: 2977616419
OpenAlex: W2977616419