Recalling oceanic communities: The transnational theatre of John Kneubuhl and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Abstract

"We are the ocean," Epeli Hau‘ofa declared in 1993, challenging the view of Pacific Islands as isolated, remote and poor communities. Instead, he proposed a vision of Oceania as a “sea of islands”, held together by long-established networks of trade, travel, and kinship, which continue to thrive in the everyday lives of ordinary people, both in the islands and in the countries along the Pacific Rim. In this paper, I will ask what it means for an Oceanic sense of community to have survived colonialism and uneven decolonization and how, given its ability to infiltrate the structures of a global economy, an Oceanic orientation might stir the world-making consciousness of communities flung together by forces of globalization? Keeping in mind that communities are people living together on limited resources, including land in particular, I will argue that such a reorientation calls for a kind of memory work that begins by rethinking genealogies in terms of finitude, difference, and interdependence. The theatre of Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl and Hawaiian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl offers such memory work from a “common” perspective, by bringing to life, and into open confrontation, irretrievable losses and exposing their significance in the formation of a community. In different ways, their plays thus recall a sense of community that seems radically opposed to communitarian thinking in a national frame but fitting to the transnational imagination of a sea of islands. As such, their memory work may also be relevant to cosmopolitan communities rethinking their foundations elsewhere.