Pasifika Black

ASALH 2023 Book Prize WinnerA lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian OceansOceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

Pasifika Black is an exceptionally brilliant, well-researched, and powerful account of how Black and Brown freedom fighters mobilized across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans to challenge racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. It represents the very best of the new scholarship on Black internationalism., Pasifika Black advances and problematizes scholarly conceptions of the ‘Black Pacific’ and ‘Afro-Asian solidarity,’ as well as highlighting histories that have not been included in dominant historical examinations of African Diaspora radicalism and twentieth-century Black internationalist movements. This is a groundbreaking contribution., Pasifika Black enriches an emerging literature tracing underexplored strands of black internationalism in the twentieth century. Swan demonstrates that black Pacific activists actively built solidarity with other African Diaspora subjects in the 1960s and 70s, even as Pan Africanists and internationalists elsewhere focused on struggles in Southern Africa and other more visible locales. In Pasifika Black we learn that political actors in often-overlooked corners of the African Diaspora bolstered local freedom quests and forged international linkages through radical reappropriations of black identity. Swan’s impressive scope and multidisciplinary approach open new vistas on the politics of global liberation.

Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization and Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice.