Please send your submissions to Anne Allen.

On January 1, 1962, Western Samoa became the first Pacific Islands country to gain independence. In an increasingly globalized world, individuals, families, communities, and the country turned to art and architecture that spoke to indigenous traditions while also communicating a newly emerging identity as a modern nation-state. The Samoan experience was not unique in that numerous Pacific cultures have had to grapple with balancing heritage and their new status as nation-states or autonomous territories in an increasingly capitalist world.

Thomas defines creativity in the context of cultural contact as reactive objectification, “a fundamental cultural process that proceeded in pre-colonial indigenous societies, facilitating mutual differentiation, but was transformed after those societies’ contact with Europeans and underwent further development as the character of colonial encounters changed” (1992:214).
These processes continued in the post-colonial environment.

Papers for this session will address how individuals, families, communities, or governments in the indigenous Pacific utilize art and architecture to express identity in today’s world. Questions to be considered might include: What are the choices being made? What motivates these choices? What are the artistic results? What is the role of hybridity? What are the interactions between the aims and artistic results of various stakes-holders? How have contemporary Pacific artists responded to the challenges of personal and cultural identity both in the island nations themselves or in the diaspora? How have communities at home and abroad asserted both heritage and contemporary distinctiveness? What roles have governments played regarding their identity on both the national and international stages? How have indigenous artists residing in traditional homelands in which they are now a minority responded to the post-colonial environment.

Thomas, Nicholas, 1992. The Inversion of Tradition. American Ethnologist, vol. 10. no. 2: 213 – 232