The interplay between minority and freedom is the very bread and butter of the colonial project. Colonialism dictates that the power is in the hands of the coloniser majority, even if sometimes that majority is numerically inferior as is evident in the slave-based economies of sugar colonies. In settler colonialism, the focus is on flooding the colonised territory with settler bodies, seizing the land, reducing, exterminating, or at least numerically minoritising, the Indigenous population, ensuring that the power will stay with the settler majority. In both scenarios, the colonised undergo, what Aimé Césaire termed in Discours sur le colonialisme, ‘chosification’: they are reduced to things to be owned, used, exploited, and consumed. In this paper, I will explore the concepts of minority and freedom within the structures of colonialism in a trans-imperial Oceanic context. I will trace the movements of colonised peoples across and between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, travelling the circuitous and intertwined French and British imperial networks of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. To what extent did notions of freedom and minority status shift in mobility? How fluid were they? How can we understand these terms within the transactional trade in human labour (free, forced and something in between)? How transformational were ocean crossings for migrants, labourers and Indigenous people moving between islands, colonies, empires, and the metropole? At what point in the journey might freedoms have been lost or gained or perceptions of minority changed? What impact does a change in space/place/time have on a person’s understanding of their own minority or freedom? And how have the concepts of freedom and minority been manipulated as discursive tools of control in the colonial project? I will discuss these questions in relation to my past and current research on blackbirding and other free and forced labour movements and migrations that criss-cross the Francophone and Anglophone Pacific, the Indian Ocean and France.

Bio:

Karin Speedy is an Associate Professor and Visiting Research Fellow at The University of Adelaide. She resides in Wellington and, as an independent scholar, is currently working on her Marsden Fund project entitled: ‘When colonial worlds connect: trans-imperial networks of forced labour between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the untold stories of Reunionese Creoles in Oceania’. An interdisciplinary academic (historian, writer, literary scholar, linguist, poet, and literary translator), Karin spent thirteen years in Sydney where she was Head of French and Francophone Studies at Macquarie University. She has published extensively on transnational, colonial and anti-colonial Pacific and Francophone history and literature, as well as Creole languages, slavery and forced labour and African and Indian Ocean diasporas in the Pacific. She is the author of five books - Foundations, her latest one, having just been published this year - and more than fifty other academic and creative publications and works. In 2013, she was awarded the John Dunmore Medal for research, recognising her major contribution to knowledge of French language and culture in the Pacific.

Si l’on en croit David Goodhart, le monde voit aujourd’hui s’affronter deux clans : les cols blancs qui sont « de Partout » imposent leurs vues à ceux qui, désespérément «de Quelque-part », ’effacent et parfois se révoltent, enfilant leur gilet jaune ou coiffant leur bonnet rouge. On peut supposer l’existence d’un troisième clan : un ensemble de sociétés minoritaires qui, de colloques universitaires en manifestations culturelles, se reconnaissent entre elles. Ainsi les Maoris étaient à l’honneur au Festival de cinéma de Douarnenez en 2001, les arts inuit et aborigène faisaient l’objet d’une exposition à l’Abbaye de Daoulas en 2010, tandis que L’École des Filles au Huelgoat s’est plusieurs fois intéressée aux voyages de Victor Segalen...

Il nous est loisible, Bretons, de voir dans chacune de ces manifestations quelque illustration de notre propre situation et de reconnaître chez les autres un même désir de reconnaissance culturelle et de liberté linguistique. Mais tout cela n’est-il pas qu’une construction intellectuelle et un peu artificielle ? L’objet de cette communication sera de chercher à entendre ces échos minoritaires hors des salons et des musées.

S’ils sont audibles, c’est sans doute dans un rapport particulier aux espaces et aux lieux. Comment les minoritaires perçoivent-ils l’infraordinaire ? Comment disent-ils le détail du monde ? Quels sont les lieux qu’ils echerchent et ceux qu’ils fuient ? Ces quelques interrogations guideront notre lecture de l’œuvre des écrivains, poètes, diaristes qui ont su dire, en breton, le Gabon, le Pérou, la Polynésie ou encore les couloirs du métro de New York.

Bio:

Erwan Hupel est maître de conférences de langue et littérature bretonnes et habilité à diriger des recherches. Il dirige l’UR CELTIC-BLM au sein de l’université Rennes 2 et est membre titulaire de la 73e section du Conseil National des Universités.

Erwan Hupel is Senior Lecturer at the University of Rennes 2 in Breton language and literature, where he is director of the Centre for Research on Breton and Celtic.

Dernières/Recent publications :

Ouvrages/Books :

• HUPEL Erwan et alii (dir.) (2022), Skridoù ar maouezed, maouezed ar skridoù - femmes de lettres minoritaires, femmes des lettres minoritaires - actes du colloque international de Rennes, TIR, Rennes (à paraître).
• HUPEL Erwan et alii (dir.) (2020), Hentoù nevez al lennegezh - Les nouveaux chemins de la littérature : repenser l’analyse des littératures en langues minorisées, TIR, Rennes.
• UPEL Erwan (2018), Ribinoù - Les degrés bretons de l'écriture, TIR, Rennes.

Articles :

• HUPEL Erwan (2022) « Connaître et reconnaître ses classiques ? La modernité littéraire bretonne et le palimpseste », colloque international organisé par FoReLLIS. Université de Poitiers. avril 2018. Thème du colloque : « Transmettre les langues minorisées -- entre promotion et relégation », actes parus sous la direction de Stéphanie Noirard, PUR, Rennes, pp. 161- 176.
• HUPEL Erwan (2021) « Where is... Yann ? Analyse topocritique des méthodes d'apprentissage de la langue bretonne », cinquième colloque international Langue et Territoire. Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. 14-17 juin 2021.
• HUPEL Erwan (2019) « Je est un autre... Moi non plus ! - Réflexions sur l’expérience amérindienne d’un prêtre breton. », colloque international organisé par le laboratoire MINEA (Migration Interculturalité et Éducation en Amazonie). Cayenne, Université de Guyane. 14-15 novembre 2019. Thème du colloque : « LITTÉRATURE, PATRIMOINE CULTUREL ET MÉMOIRE D’AMAZONIE », (actes à paraître).

Pacific Hubs, Pacific Tension: Indigeneity, Migration and Place.

What forms of connection are possible between Pacific people in any one Pacific site? How do discourses related to minorities and freedoms interact with discourses of sovereignty and whakapapa?

And, how can we engage Hau’ofa’s multiply-networked vision of ‘our sea of islands’ in ways that do not flatten out, willfully ignore, or undermine specific relations of Indigenous/ migrant Pacific

peoples? In her recollection of another Pacific-themed conference Christchurch back in 1992, Teresia Teaiwa writes: “there was a tension between the Islanders and the tāngata whenua.” (“L(o)osing the Edge” 2001) As a Māori scholar, I have thought most about how these dynamics operate in New Zealand, where Māori and Pasifika communities have often been structured by white supremacy and settler colonialism but we have also found ways to connect through other – Indigenous – logics and solidarities in particular moments, contexts and communities. My current monograph-in-process, ‘Writing the new world: Indigenous Pacific engagements with periodicals 1900-1975,’ holds Aotearoa New Zealand alongside three other Pacific sites: Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i. Each of the sites is simultaneously home to specific Indigenous Pacific peoples and home to members of Pacific communities who have migrated there – largely along imperial networks – in the past two centuries. I found myself grappling with how (or whether) I could adequately, responsibly and productively trace the forms of Pacific connection and is connection within and between specific (and very different) Pacific sites, and eventually turned to Renya Ramirez’s Native Hubs: culture, community and belonging in Silicon Valley and beyond, a text I had connected with in the context of North American Indigenous Studies. In this presentation, I will trace the dynamics described here, and propose that Ramirez’s concept of the ‘hub’ is a tangible and flexible metaphor that can enable us to both recall and envision the ways in which Indigenous Pacific peoples (local and migrant/ diasporic) connect along and beyond the imaginaries of contemporary states and regionalisms and, perhaps, the imaginaries we have of ourselves.

Bio:

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a scholar, poet and irredentist who writes and teaches at the intersections of literary studies, Indigenous studies and Pacific studies. Having taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i, she now holds a professorship at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English Language & Literatures and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Her publications include Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (Minn 2012), 250 Ways To Start an Essay about Captain Cook (BWB 2021) and a book of poetry Always Italicise: how to write while colonised (AUP 2022). She is currently completing a book manuscript (contracted to Minnesota) that emerged from a Marsden-funded research project titled ‘Writing the New World: Indigenous texts 1900-1975;’ focusing on Indigenous engagements with periodicals, the book brings together Indigenous writing from/in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i.

La notion d’une minorité révélée uniquement par un décompte des éléments, comme dans le résultat d’un vote majoritaire, ou dans le recensement de populations selon l’origine, s’est élargie dans le discours occidental des années 1960, quand on a commencé à parler de « minorités sexuelles », pour désigner des différences par rapport à ce qui semble une norme, sans comptabilité. « Minorité » devenait synonyme de « non heteronormative», qu’il s’agisse de quelques personnes ou de plusieurs millions d’entre elles. Je préfère pour ma part parler de « minorité de genre », car la première expression crée l’illusion que les différences ne portent que sur l’orientation sexuelle, alors qu’il y des minorités de genre qui ne se définissent pas nécessairement, et pas au premier niveau des distinctions, par leur pratique sexuelle. Il s’agit, dans la région polynésienne, de celles et ceux qui, déclarés nés-garçons, revendiquent à un certain âge d’être « en réalité » des filles, et (mais on oublie en général d’en parler) de celles qui, déclarées nées-filles, revendiquent à un certain âge d’être « en réalité » des garçons. Le discours commun les qualifie alors respectivement de « comme des filles » (en samoan : faa-fafine) et « comme des garçons » en samoan faa-tama ou plus récemment faa-fa-tama). La question des « libertés » est triple. 1) Quels obstacles devant cette revendication disons « trans-genre » ? 2) pourquoi la transition pour les nées-filles rencontre-t-elle bien plus d’obstacles où, quel paradoxe !, on retrouve alors une inégalité de genre au sein des minorités de genre ? 3) comment comprendre que même dans le discours des transgenres, la demande de liberté d’appartenir à une minorité de genre s’accompagne d’un refus de revendiquer la liberté d’appartenir à une minorité sexuelle (par exemple le droit à l’homosexualité, ou encore le droit au mariage de même sexe).

(English Translation)

The notion of a minority revealed only by a count of units, as in the result of a majority vote, or in the census of populations according to origin, expanded in the Western discourse of the 1960s, when one began to speak of "sexual minorities", to designate differences from what seems a norm, without actual counting. "Minority" became synonymous with "non-heteronormative", whether it was a few people or several million. I prefer to speak of "gender minority", because the former expression creates the illusion that differences are only about sexual orientation, whereas there are gender minorities who do not define themselves, at least not at the first level of distinctions, by their sexual practice. In the Polynesian region, these are those who are declared to be born boys but who claim to be 'actually' girls at a certain age, and (but this is generally forgotten) those who are declared to be born girls but who claim to be 'actually' boys at a certain age. The common discourse then qualifies them respectively as 'like girls' (in Samoan: faa-fafine) and 'like boys' (in Samoan faa-tama or more recently faa-fa-tama). The question of 'freedom' is threefold. 1) What are the obstacles to this so-called 'trans-gender' claim? 2) Why does the transition for girl-born meet with so many more obstacles in comparison with boy-born ? Paradoxically, do we find a new gender inequality within gender minorities? 3) How can we understand that even in the discourse of transgender people, the demand for freedom to belong to a gender minority is accompanied by a refusal to claim the freedom to belong to a sexual minority (for example, the right to homosexuality, or the right to same-sex marriage) ?

Bio:

Serge Tcherkézoff is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at EHESS, associated with Australian National University in Canberra and the University of French Polynesia in Papeete. He is a founding member (1995) of the CREDO, the French Center for Pacific Studies CREDO (ANU-CNRS-EHESS). His works (over ten books and a hundred articles) bring together the results of his field enquiries in Western Polynesia (Sāmoa) during the decades 1980–1990 and an ethno-historical critique of European inventions (16th-20th centuries) about Polynesia: mainly, settlement and “races”, fabrications about first encounters with Westerners (the myth of the “Vahine” and the silence on the initial violence), misunderstandings about political systems, about hierarchies in Polynesian systems and, more recently, misunderstandings about  “gender” relations (particularly regarding the “gender- variant” communities).