Cultural Seascapes, Regional Connections, and Colonial Powers in the Southwestern Pacific

Abstract

Between the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, Australia and the islands of the southwestern Pacific were the setting of a wide context of encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, in regions that could be perceived as disconnected at a first glance. However, it was part of a wider project of colonization that overlapped on a not less wide set of Indigenous networks of interconnection. Such a colonial project had landscape modification as a main common goal, added to projects of ethnic and cultural separation and segregation. This article suggests an approach to cultural seascapes as an approach to power relations between European colonizers and Indigenous people in this region. I suggest that this level of analysis allows to connect realities that could be perceived as disparate, but which were coherent with global projects of imposition of colonial identities according to a dominant global matrix of power. I aim to highlight the value of local spaces of interconnection as expressions of wider realities, approachable throughout the analysis of cultural seascapes as mobile spaces of power relations.