Essay

• Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish intellectual born in Berlin in 1892 to wealthy parents.
• Following his death, his writing was nearly forgotten until the publication in German in 1955 of an anthology of his work.

• However, he failed to obtain the formal qualification at the University of Frankfurt that would have enabled him to become an academic.
• Arendt’s sense is that Benjamin’s eccentric genius jarred with the mediocrity of the university system.
• He had a visa to the US, but met with trouble as he was making his way to neutral Portugal.
• Read more:
  Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Ayn Rand all felt 'different' in the world – and changed the way we think

My younger self’s kind of thinker

• Benjamin was my younger self’s kind of thinker.
• And just as significantly, he was a philosopher in the sense of being someone who seeks truth.
• And to range freely across ideas is a sign of someone who will likely ask too many questions.

• Benjamin was an unfettered intellectual who held the tension between the old and the new – between tradition and renewal.
• Today, many one-dimensional, intellectual clones, who are, ironically, influenced by Benjamin’s ideas, uncritically sweep aside the old.
• But then there was not all that much room for Benjamin’s way in his own time, either.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

• In earlier times, Benjamin argues, when different economic systems dominated, art had “cult” value.
• But many other examples come to mind, such as the art buried alongside the pharaohs.
• For Benjamin, in its earliest ritualistic incarnations, art was not even recognised as art but as magic.
• And who would even refer to the material we produce on social media as art – even though it is sometimes artistic?
• And this unique work has an aura, which includes the process of creation and the work’s journeys in the world.
• But once we learned the techniques of reproducing art for mass exhibition and exchange, the aura was diminished or even lost.

Theses on the philosophy of history (1940)

• In short: history is often the tool of the powerful.
• As Benjamin’s argument develops, it becomes clear that for him, emancipation from fascism will in part proceed from a retelling of history – from brushing history “against the grain”.
• The point is that the fascists told a version of history that presented themselves as the vector of progress.
• But a more thorough telling of history, that included the experiences of the oppressed, such as Jewish people, would reveal the fallacious nature of fascist history.

The Task of the Translator (1923)

• However, in art, language becomes the bearer of meanings that are more vivid but also more elusive.
• Benjamin writes,
  It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
• It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
• These sentiments help us probe the mystery of why art itself even exists – why art has such an effect on us.

Jamie Q Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• They announced the way forward as the “Blue Pacific – Our Sea of Islands, Our Livelihoods, Our Oceania”.
• It’s a revealing example of how the study of the Pacific and the practice of Pacific politics often intersect.
• Rapidly, the Blue Pacific – a story about a place – had become a new place.
• Regional organisations connected through the Blue Pacific, and it became a cornerstone of diplomatic and national language.

New names, old stories

• Holding together the new movement – which was launched at a moment of considerable difficulty for the region – was an old story.
• The Forum leaders and others around it explicitly referred to the Blue Pacific as a narrative.
• As the Samoan Prime Minister put it, “[t]he Blue Pacific provides a new narrative for Pacific Regionalism and how the Forum engages with the world”.

The Indo-Pacific as geopolitical construct

• The Indo-Pacific is now a geopolitical construct said to encompass the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and shifting, unspecified parts of the Pacific Ocean.
• In other words, it both marginalises and co-opts the Indigenous Pacific of which I write.
• Read more:
  Australia has long viewed the Pacific as a place of threats that must be contained.
• Such is the power of this particular narrative and construct that it is central to many of the most vital geopolitical discourses and activities globally.

An unequal ocean

• Though there is a vibrancy to Indigenous traditions and narration, they do not have the same access and circulation; the Pacific remains an unequal ocean.
• In very few areas is this not apparent, but I wish to draw attention to one specific way in which the colonial, and particularly the decolonising experience, shaped the unequal oceanscapes of the present: mobility.
• The terms and conditions of formal decolonisation – what I think of as the decolonising bargain – was a bargain struck in profoundly unequal times and in unequal ways, where much of the power lay with former colonial rulers and international players.

‘New blackbirds’

• The Pacific diaspora, so deeply conditioned by the decolonising bargain, has not mattered equally to Pacific nations recently.
• In smaller islands and nations these opportunities have seen mobility on remarkable scales; Niue is perhaps the most striking.
• Since the 1970s the number of Niueans in Niue has declined by around two-thirds, falling from over 5,000 to less than 2,000.
• As elsewhere in the former (or, as some might contend, currently) colonised world, the visible benefits of colonialism are not readily evident.

Mobility and sovereignty

• In each of these places, Indigenous Pacific migrants experience outcomes that more closely match their Indigenous neighbours than those of Pākehā/Papālagi/white populations.
• There are also other costs that these Indigenous Pacific people confront — paid in language, culture, well-being, identity, independence and sovereignty.
• The transnational dimensions wrought by those Indigenous folks afforded mobility are profound.
• As Epeli Hau‘ofa so powerfully put it, these Pacific peoples can craft lives that resonate with the mobility of the ancestors.
• But the majority of Pacific peoples do not have access to transnational mobility.

Damon Salesa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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