Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific by Diana Looser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific by Diana Looser Jenna Gerdsen Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific. By Diana Looser, University of Michigan Press, 2021. Cloth: $80.00, e-book: $64.95. 358 pages. In the fields of theatre and performance studies, there is a great disparity between scholarship about the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds. Scholarship on the Atlantic is so pervasive that it has informed much of our discipline. Landmark studies such as Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) inaugurated the dominant Circum-Atlantic and Hemispheric paradigms. Diana Looser's Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific is a response to growing interest in decentering hegemonic, Western epistemologies and adopting Indigenous paradigms. In her introduction, titled "Toward a Transpasifika Performance," Looser outlines how Western hegemony and militarization have informed theorizations of the Pacific world and how Pacific Islander studies scholars have challenged mappings of Oceania. Looser considers how directing attention to the Pacific world might decolonize and advance theatre and performance studies. Moving Islands answers long overdue questions: How can Western, non-Indigenous scholars holistically understand performance from the Pacific world? And what do theatre and performance illuminate about the Pacific world? Moving Islands is a thoughtful and ambitious project that examines art installations, dance dramas, theater production and performance activism of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The book consists of four case studies that collectively explore topics including real and representational Pacific voyages, Oceanian theatrical aesthetics, climate change activism, migration, diasporic community-building, urbanization and militarization. Looser uses these case studies to showcase the great potential of transpasifika, an Indigenized term that provides a theoretical lens through which to see the Pacific world relationally and that centers Indigenous and Islander perspectives. In an epilogue titled "Pacific Futures," Looser calls for a commitment to increase Pacific Islander scholarship and its presence in university curricula. Positioning herself as a Pakeha, or a white New Zealander, Looser insists that she should not be the only voice on Pacific theater and performance and asserts that a plurality of voices and a relational approach are required to fully account for the Pacific world's cultural, linguistic, political, and geographic diversity. Calling for a "wider transpacific imaginary" (25), Looser rejects continent-based schemas and adopts an island- and Indigenous-centered approach. Situated in transpacific studies and Indigenous studies, and informed by relevant discussions on how migration, hybridity, and diaspora impact constructions of Indigeneity, Moving Islands explains how people who inhabit and travel across the Pacific Ocean use theater and [End Page 97] performance to respond to environmental and economic crises, to resist imperial domination and military occupation, to form distinct ethnic and regional identities, and to create a diasporic and global network. Looser's transpasifika framework traces and illuminates the artistic diversity, coalition-building, migrations, modes of place-making, and identifications that occur across and beyond the Pacific. The book's title conveys Looser's significant scholarly intervention: she moves islands to the forefront of our imaginations of the Pacific and makes them legible in theater and performance studies. She creates a kaleidoscopic lens that allows scholars across multiple disciplines to see an intricate, dynamic, global network of people, cultures, and aesthetics. Looser models what Pacific theatre and performance should look like by supplying readers with objects, methods, and terms rooted in Indigenous cultures for understanding the Pacific world in this current era of globalization. In chapter 2, Looser analyzes stage spectacles, theater productions, dance-dramas, and art installations that represent vaka, meaning "canoe" in many languages spoken across the Pacific, by artists based in Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand. Looser presents vaka as a "genealogical vehicle that binds the bodies of those in the present to those of their seafaring ancestors" (45) and as a metaphor through which to understand Oceanian identities, cultures, and histories. Demonstrating that corporeal performance initiates and sustains ancestral and global connections, Looser prepares readers to understand the significant role performance plays in activism, community-building, and identity formation. In chapter 3 she examines the...