Book review: Quito Swan’s Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World
Quito Swan’s Pasifika Black has already established itself as a critical text that asserts Melanesia’s place in Planetary Blackness and raises critical questions on Black internationalism and solidarity.
In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and across the world after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, one of the prominent questions at the forefront of global discourse was: which Black lives? Was the movement exclusive to the U.S.? Did Black lives in other parts of the world matter, too? Was their experience of Blackness and anti-Black racism the same? Was bringing up these questions distracting from the issue at hand?
In countries of the Pacific such as Aotearoa New Zealand, where I live, and Papua New Guinea, where I trace my roots, the questions led to further questions on what it meant for Pacific communities to stand in solidarity with the Black American struggle while often not doing the same with Melanesian movements—for example, West Papuans’ decades-long struggle for self-determination and independence from Indonesian rule. What appeared to be lacking was a way to frame these movements’ struggles within the broader contexts of global Black liberation movements.
It was in this moment when I first encountered Bermudian scholar Quito Swan’s Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World—an astute and ambitious account of an often-forgotten chapter of Pacific history: Melanesia’s solidarity and collaboration with global Black liberation movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the time, I was working on my doctoral thesis examining how colonial-capitalism and white supremacy were imposed in the Pacific to deny the humanity of Melanesians and justify the ongoing oppression of West Papuans. In trying to interrogate this situation, I found that so much of our histories had been neglected. They were lost or hidden, buried within the writings of old dead white men who failed to recognise how their Eurocentric mindsets shaped their interpretations of our worlds. I began to despair: how could I write about our struggles with racism and white supremacy if I had no historical basis to ground my analysis, no means of demonstrating the relationships between the specificities of our struggles and their connections to the wider Black world?
In the midst of this despair, Pasifika Black was published, and my work began to fall into place.
Tracing Melanesian struggles for liberation across the Pacific, including Black Power at the University of Papua New Guinea and Négritude movements in Kanaky/New Caledonia, Swan invites us to take stock of the enduring relationships and solidarities between Melanesia and the global Black world. In the chapter on West Papua, he goes further by provoking reflection on the critical Pan-Africanism and Black internationalisms expressed by West Papuan liberation fighters from the beginnings of their struggle for freedom. This appeal to Black internationalism was rooted in the shared legacies of colonial violence and enslavement by colonial powers through the imposition of Blackbirding—the Pacific slave trade. However, this Black internationalism also emerged as a reaction to Indonesian powers’ false assertions of shared ethnic heritage in a cynical attempt to claim West Papua as an Indonesian territory. These claims culminated in the 1969 plebiscite, wherein just over 1,000 West Papuan elders were held at gunpoint and forced to vote to recognise West Papua as an Indonesian territory. What has unfolded since this vote has been described as a slow genocide, where more than 500,000 West Papuans have been murdered at the hands of Indonesian forces.
What Swan identifies is that while the West Papuans sought to identify their struggles within Black internationalist framings, this relationship was not always reciprocated. This was the result of several intersecting issues. In the first instance, Indonesia had positioned itself as a lead on decolonisation through their struggle for liberation from Dutch colonialism, which acted as a smokescreen to obscure Indonesian colonial violence. Similarly, Indonesia had received support from the Soviet Union in their struggles for liberation, which, coupled with the Marxist and Socialist tendencies of many of the Pan-African liberation movements, meant these movements were reluctant to express true solidarity and internationalism with the West Papuan struggle. At the same time, there were stalwart figures such as Léopold Senghor, whose Black internationalism informed his commitment to recognising West Papua as part of the Black diaspora. What Swan brings to the forefront of contemporary questions on Black internationalism, therefore, is the recognition that the question of Melanesia, of West Papua, remains unresolved.
Throughout the book, Swan does not diminish the voice, autonomy, or significance of the Black Pacific liberation movements he writes about. Rather, he demonstrates the interconnectedness of these movements to broader struggles against the global dynamics of colonial-capitalism. He brings together these histories in a bid to remind the world of Melanesia’s role as part of the global Black diaspora.
There were, however, moments where Pasifika Black’s position as a text that is about, but not from, the Pacific was recognisable. Moments in which the absence of Indigenous Pacific perspectives meant that some relationships and connections were left unexamined and wanting for more. Moments in which elucidating our spiritual relationships and Indigenous metaphysical perspectives might have been valuable. For example, while Swan might view this text as just an historical account of the struggles which have taken place, what it has come to represent within the Pacific is a genealogy of our liberation struggles; it is a key part of the story of our whakapapa—our ancestral narratives of who we are and where we have come from. Similarly, the framing of “Oceania”, of collective regional Pacific identities and the influence of Pacific scholars such as Epeli Hau’ofa, Haunani-Kay Trask, Teresia Teaiwa, and Albert Wendt, was notably underdeveloped.
In this respect, this is less of a critique and more of an invitation to Swan and all who are interested in continuing the work of building solidarities between the radical traditions of Melanesia and the rest of the Black world to work with us. If we are to begin to move together in the struggle against white supremacy and colonial-capitalism, we are going to need to work together. Because ultimately, as part of the rising chorus of Black international solidarities, the fundamental truth that Swan highlights in Pasifika Black is that Melanesia is here, and we have something to say.
