Recalling Oceanic Communities: The Transnational Theater of John Kneubuhl and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Abstract

This chapter situates the dramatic work of Samoan and Hawaiian playwrights John Kneubuhl and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl in relation to an Oceanian sense of community rooted in a customarily open, fluid, and mobile consciousness of space, in order to ask how such a community consciousness may challenge dominant political identifications and empower the imagination of transnational, postcolonial forms of belonging. Noting the fundamental importance of memory in sustaining a sense of community that thrives in mobility while maintaining the indivisibility of people and land, the chapter examines the memory work performed in John Kneubuhl’s Think of a Garden and Other Plays and Victoria Kneubuhl’s Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays, as it stirs the limits of living memory, discloses the spectral life of the past in the present, an raises questions about the relationship between loss and remembrance. In different ways, it is argued, these plays can be seen to enact a sense of community that seems radically opposed to communitarian thinking in a national frame but fitting to the transnational imagination of a sea of islands, reimagining genealogies in terms of finitude, difference, and interdependence.