Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific By Diana Looser. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 358, 31 illustrations. $80 cloth, $64.95 e-book.

Abstract

The whakataukī, or Māori proverb, He waka eke noa—“We are all in the waka [canoe] together”—evolved as a kind of mantra, or catchphrase, for the collective commitment and resilience of the population of Aotearoa/New Zealand during the global COVID-19 pandemic; as a “Team of Five Million” we were “all in this together.” The co-option of an Indigenous worldview as a national positionality was not only utopian; it also operated as a form of gaslighting—an enforced performance of oceanic unity when the reality was widespread disenfranchisement and increasing inequity for Māori. With a more critical motivation, Diana Looser’s Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific also adopts the metaphor of the waka/vaka to evoke the mobility and diversity of Pacific citizens traversing within and across islandscapes. Looser’s monograph explores “how cultural and artistic performance highlights the ways that the millions of people who inhabit and descend from the Pacific Ocean navigate the environmental, economic, and military exigencies of the contemporary moment” (1–2). Articulated through a mediating paradigm she calls “transpasifika,” Looser employs various intercultural and performance studies theories to address a perceived dearth of performance praxis and critical theory on contemporary work in the Pacific region (3). Looser espouses the notion of etak from the Caroline Islands: a seafarer who occupies a steady, “conceptually immobile” canoe on course within a sea of “moving islands” (3–4). This performative trope, Looser suggests, usefully describes “Pacific creative artists who maintain control of their projects as they weather the vicissitudes of collaboration, funding, and production in local and global contexts” (4).