Arts Collected Works - Research Publications
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ItemSamoa’s New Labour Trade(Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa, 2021)This article explores the context of aspirations to become seasonal workers in New Zealand or Australia and the experiences of those who worked in New Zealand under the Recognized Seasonal Employer scheme. It is based on detailed interviews with 24 people who were seasonal workers or who aspired to become seasonal workers in 2020, and on other relevant sources. The focus of the article is the recruitment processes and the economic, social and historical contexts of seasonal work in Samoa.
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ItemWhose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation(UNIV HAWAII PRESS, 2018)This essay is a critical reexamination of the trope of paradise. This trope has a long global history encompassing colonial imaginings and missionary and travel narratives, and notions of “paradise” continue to influence contemporary narratives of place and landscape in the Pacific for Indigenous groups and others. While much has been written about the potency of the paradise trope in the West, it is often implicitly assumed that Indigenous engagement with the trope amounts to a simple rejection or dismissal of “paradise.” In contrast, we suggest that the dynamics of possession, dispossession, and repossession of paradise require further investigation. Paradise is both an imaginary that frames foreign engagement with the Pacific and a complex political landscape that is mobilized by Indigenous people both to contest neocolonial forms of appropriation and exploitation and to affirm local articulations of ownership and belonging in the Pacific.
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ItemCinderella of the south seas? Virtuous victims, empowerment and other fables of development feminism(Elsevier, 2020-05-01)The developmental logic underpinning ‘Cinderella projects,’ in which women of the Global South are targeted for interventions intended to tap and expand their unrecognized economic and entrepreneurial potential. This version of ‘development feminism,’ constructs its female objects as both impoverished victim-subjects and as nascent market-oriented actors. Moreover, development feminist discourse, grounded as it is in seemingly universal ideas of women’s oppression, equality and economic participation, generates paradoxical effects in different social contexts. Drawing on ethnographic examples from Polynesia, the paper illustrates how a homogeneous concept of ‘woman’ makes little sense because local gender categories are complexly intersected by age, socio-economic status as well as by hereditary rank. As a result, development feminisms’ gender interventions transform local individual subjectivities in novel and often unexpected ways, producing new forms of inequality while obscuring others.
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ItemEn las fronteras del género: política y transformaciones de la no-heteronormatividad en Polinesia = Gender on the edge: The politics and transformations of non-heteronormativity in Polynesia(Universidad de Murcia, 2016-11-01)En las sociedades polinesias, las personas con un género o sexualidad no-heteronormativos ocupan, a un mismo tiempo, posiciones marginales y lugares centrales en la estructura social: forman una categoría social extremadamente visible, pero cuyas fronteras son a la vez borrosas. Esta duplicidad nos insta a pasar desde una aproximación que pretende aislarlos en tanto categoría identitaria a otra aproximación que se centra en las prácticas sociales, culturales y políticas. Esta aproximación comienza con la historia de los contactos entre Isleños y Occidentales, una historia que parece haber cumplido un papel central en la emergencia social de la no-heteronormatividad en la región. Rechazando los modelos simplistas que enfrentan “tradición” y “modernidad” para abrazar en su lugar la complejidad de estas categorías, pretendemos localizar la no- heteronormatividad polinesia en la convergencia de fuerzas locales y globales y en los intersticios entre moralidades diferentes que, sin embargo, funcionan simultáneamente.