Black Pacific Mindscapes - A Beginner's Shortlist 

                                                       

 

The Black Pacific is an imagined geo-social collective mind-space in and around what, in English, is called 'The Pacific Rim."

 

The Black Pacific is a pointer, a fictional yet very real gathering of issues of a geo-cultural, political tension brought about through the hierarchy of colors that exists in our present world, both in physical-social bodies, as well as having to do with ideas and priorities and forms that prioritize a colonial legacy of separation and segregated, i.e. individuated, forms of thinking and relating, as well as ordering of hypodescent (higher and on-top: the white, the lower and on bottom: the blacker and black), morally, figuratively and politically--performed through social-political relations and structures.

 

The tendency to think of time as static and moving linear toward a progress, as well as thinking of identities as static and eternal (or modernizing), are also born of colonial ideas, displacing so many other worldviews and values.

 

Because of this, the Black Pacific covers and endless array of issues the extend in many directions, from identity formation to human trafficking and adoption, to economic changes, ecologies of land and racism, gendered and sexualized violences, debates on assimilation and sovereignty, and other issues based on trajectory, experience, intimacy, and our personal paths.

The following is recommended to *begin* to conceive of a Black Pacific--

In Suggested order of Reading:

 

1)  Jane Hiddleston -

Understanding Postcolonialism

 

2)  Emma Christopher and Cassandra Pybus -

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World

3)  Julian Aguon -

What We Bury at Night: Disposable Humanity. Tokyo: Blue Ocean Press, 2008

 

4)  Gerald Horne -

 The White Pacific: US Imperialism and Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War

 

5)  Robert Kirk -

Paradise Past: The Transformation of the Pacific, 1520 - 1910

 

6)  Michael Cullen Green -

Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire After World War II

 

7)  Robbie Shilliam --

The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections

 

 

                                       Click on Links at the Top for Three (3) Lists