Description
Fiction by European artists has long romanticised and sexualised the islands and people of the Pacific, the colonial gaze coding islanders as “exotic, malleable and, most of all, dispensible” (T. K. Teaiwa 1994). This romanticisation is reproduced in climate narratives of the ‘sinking island paradise’, where islanders become the perfect charismatic victims of rising seas (Weatherill 2022). Against and despite these narratives, Pacific authors / scholars / poets have created their own fictions and narratives, of survival and resistance.
This paper argues that locating Oceanic counternarratives in fiction and poetry as well as activism and scholarship reflects the power of storytelling in politics. Starting from the argument that climate politics is all based upon imaginaries of future worlds, I argue that looking beyond the stories being told in the centres of colonial power is of fundamental importance for challenging the dominant narratives of climate doom and sacrifice.
