Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish

Abstract

In the face of world-ending narratives including extinction, sea level rise, and climate change, I argue that Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, Keri Hulme’s Stonefish, and Kiribati’s climate adaptation plan Migration with Dignity produce new models for imagining futurity. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems historicize Pacific extinction narratives, Hulme’s short stories produce readers capable of recognizing the new reality of climate change, and Migration with Dignity, when read through science fiction theories of utopia and dystopia, critique Westphalian statehood. Together these works resist hegemonic narratives of Pacific futurelessness to produce the future as a terrain of contingent epistemological contest rather than a foreclosed prediction.