Beyond the rim: redrawing boundaries in Pacific theatre

Abstract

In the past twenty years, writers and scholars from the Pacific have increasingly challenged the dominant definition of their region in terms of the ‘Pacific Rim’ as a view which subsumes the Pacific Ocean and the lives it sustains to the interests of continental powers bordering the region. As a defining (framing) concept, the Pacific Rim paradoxically excludes what it contains, the island world of Oceania, disregarding it, in Epeli Hau‘ofa’s memorable phrase, as if it were “the hole in the doughnut” (13). Against a view of Pacific Islands as tiny and isolated specks of land in a largely unpopulated sea, destined to serve as bases for resource extraction, military installations and tourist ventures, Hau‘ofa and others have championed a Pacific Studies agenda that conceives of Oceania as a vast and intricately connected world, shaped by long histories of settlement and mobility and sustained by a cultural legacy of ecological stewardship and negotiating fluid boundaries. Yet the formation of a 21st-century Trans-Pacific Partnership and responses to it in the Asia-Pacific region, still largely leaving out the island states of the Pacific, demonstrate the abiding hegemonic appeal and power of Pacific Rim discourse in economic (and geopolitical) contexts. Meanwhile, as Teresia Teaiwa notes, the empowerment rationale of (indigenous) Pacific Studies, while articulating alternative values and methodologies for social science research, so far falls short of developing strong connections with wider networks of genuinely decolonizing scholarship and world making (115-16). In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Pacific drama and theater can contribute to the shaping of a perspective and a vision of a Pacific world ‘beyond the rim’, by attending to the cross-cultural conditions of the life of island societies themselves as well as their connections and engagement with globality at large. For this, I intend to consider how plays by Pacific writers in text and performance stage and interpret such relations by drawing, negotiating, and redrawing boundaries, of gender and kinship, culture and language, tradition and modernity. Looking at examples from various parts of Oceania, I will try to identify the social imaginaries they project and address their relevance to communities for which, as Joakim Peter says of Chuuk islanders, the horizon “is no longer ‘out there’ [but] now at home” (266). References: Hau‘ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Ed. Eric Waddell et al. Suva, FJ: Beake House, 1993. 2-16. Peter, Joakim. “Chuukese Travelers and the Idea of Horizon.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41.3 (Dec. 2000): 253-67. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda? Specifying Pacific Studies.” Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific. Ed. Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss. Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2010. 110-24.