Unearthing Phosphate in the Pacific Pastoral

Abstract

Much humanities scholarship has focused “on the question of power and its origins,” write Zachary Caple and Gregory Cushman in a recent article on the cultures of phosphorus, “yet very little work has been done on the nature of fertility.” Just as critical theory has emphasized production over reproduction, as materialist feminists point out, fertility has been relatively overlooked in the study of narrative, despite the concept’s usefulness for analyzing the gendered and environmental forces that drive or disrupt narrative temporalities, from the lifecycle to the seasons.1 Since writers from Oceania—the island regions spanning the Pacific Ocean—have long contended with colonial myths of island fertility as well as co-existing discourses of “depopulation,” the Oceanic archive offers a unique opportunity to critically center fertility in humanities scholarship.2 Writers from this region, proclaiming that “Gauguin is dead!”, have rejected Edenic narratives of bountiful islands and sexually available women, showing how these myths have legitimized exploitation and dispossession (see for example Teaiwa, “The ‘Polynesian’ Body”; Figiel; Taouma; Marata Tamaira). Attentive to colonialism’s anti-reproductive effects, Oceanic writers have also registered disruptions to natural cycles as these are felt on the “frontiers” of women’s bodies—from Atu Emberson-Bain’s analysis of the embodied effects of plantation agriculture, mining, and overfishing in Fiji, to Katerina Teaiwa’s creative ethnography of the gendered impact of phosphate mining in Banaba, through to Kathy Jetn̅il-Kijiner’s poeticization of the literal forms of infertility created by nuclear radiation in the Marshall Islands.3 At the same time, as Sia Figiel’s work also demonstrates in the Samoan context, Indigenous understandings of fertility as a relation rather than a resource situate reproduction within shared human and extra-human worlds, working against the extractive logics encoded into European genres such as the romance and the pastoral.4