Abstract
Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific excavates a set of connections that link Black and Māori people of Aotearoa (New Zealand) that expands the historical work on the Black Pacific. In an introduction, nine brief chapters, and a conclusion, Shilliam describes political, spiritual, cultural, and artistic exchanges between Black and Brown people with a focus on the politically formative times of the 1970s and 1980s. His theoretical framework contests subaltern framings of (post)colonized people to instead highlight their agency through the practice of “grounding,” or the cultivation of knowledge of “deep relation” between of the children of Legba (Black people) and the children of Tāne/Māui (Māori of Aotearoa). In pursuit of decolonial science of “deep relation” (p. 13)—an approach that refutes the segregationist practices and racism of colonial science—Shilliam provides a temporal look back to historical anticolonial interconnections between Black and Brown, African diasporic, and Māori and Pasifika peoples. By “doubling back” in time, he unearths “a deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity” (p. 3) that is binding and can help repair colonial wounds.
In consecutive chapters, The Black Pacific excavates personal, political, spiritual, and cultural connections between members of the African diaspora with Māori mostly in Aotearoa, but also in the heart of the Empire (England), Ethiopia, and Jamaica. Stretching back in time, Shilliam articulates crossovers between the origin stories of African and Oceanic people with a focus on Māori. Urbanizing Māori politically identified with Black Power, taken up by Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Islander) activists who founded the Polynesian Panthers and included gangs, like Black Power. These multigenerational activists earned audiences with politicians, critiqued capitalism, and developed community-based services similar to the Oakland-based Black Panthers’ 10-point program. This book also contributes to religious studies in its expansive treatment of the spiritual and religious connections of the church, the arrival of Black Liberation Theologists in Aotearoa that articulated resistance to racism, and the resonance and practice of Rastafarianism. A section on the arrival of the Black British reggae band Keskidee reveals art and especially reggae music as a central expression of Māori identifications with Blackness. In each chapter, Shilliam’s theoretically oriented approach to united politics and careful attention to tensions and contradictions unfold in the narratives of Black people who interconnect with Māoris on their travels.
Shilliam has been challenged about his (in)attention the racial landscape and taxonomies Europeans developed across the Pacific that elevate Polynesians as being closer to whites than Melanesians, so named for their dark skin. Rather, his analysis takes into account the racialization of Polynesians with a specific focus on Aotearoa. Readers, especially those less familiar with Aotearoa, could, however, benefit from a contextual and more grounded opening chapter that provides a sense of the people, history, and debates that frame the nation. People at times fall out of Shilliam’s urgent and conceptual message for connection through his temporal doubling back to a time of connection and identification. Rooting arguments in the specifics of conversations, meetings, and exchanges is necessary for the reader to travel with the author on his explorations of the political implications of these exchanges as a celebration of Black and Brown grounding.
The Black Pacific is an important contribution to a growing area of studies named, with some controversy, the “Black Pacific”—what Shilliam considers “both a provocation and a problem” (p. 9). First, it focuses on Pacific Island peoples, whereas so much work on the Pacific Rim flies over and across the Pacific (as if it were devoid of places and people) to Asia. Second, much of the existing work on Black people in the Pacific provides important historical context, but Shilliam charts out more contemporary political intersections and negotiations that took place in especially the 1970s and 1980s. Black Power ideologies from the continental United States traveled across the Pacific to influence Māori moves to reclaim cultural connection and to fight Pakeha racism. While focusing on Black and Brown, The Black Pacific illustrates the complex self-reflexivity and contributions, too, of some Pakeha who were processing and attempting to overcome their role in settler colonialism at “home,” often refracted through their analysis of apartheid South Africa and other settler nations. This important and readable theoretical book speaks to the relations of formerly enslaved peoples and peoples dispossessed of land, of natives and nonwhite settlers. Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific is a compelling scholarly and politically informed work that recognizes empathetic ties across formerly colonized people.