In the 19th century Melanesians were pejoratively labelled black by European maritime explorers (mela = black; nesia = islands). Emerging scholarship on the Black Pacific focuses on historical and contemporary identifications and articulations between Oceanian and African diasporic peoples, cultures and politics based upon shared Otherness to colonial occupiers. This essay contributes to such scholarship by presenting a perspective from Melanesia with a focus on music, a popular form of countercolonial expression. It examines in two broad phases person-to-person and person-to-text encounters with Atlantic-based notions of Black Power and négritude. The Pacific War serves as a dividing line and turning point, during and following which such encounters began to intensify. The discussion links these African diasporic intellectual traditions/discourses/epistemologies with that of indigènitude, that is, performed global expressions of Indigenousness, through allusions to Black transnationalism and the ways both movements address the “inferiority confusion” that arose from experiences of colonisation. It demonstrates how in the last 35 years in particular, Melanesians have worked to invert the demeaning intention of their colonial racial construction and, in the process, have helped to create what may now be thought of as the Black Pacific.

中文翻译：

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美拉尼西亚的“黑太平洋”与非殖民化：表演中立和土著

在19世纪，欧洲海上探险家将美拉尼西亚人贬义地标记为黑色（美拉=黑色；尼西亚=岛​​屿）。在黑太平洋地区，新兴的学术研究着眼于大洋洲和非洲的流离失所者，文化和政治之间基于对殖民地居民的共同异性的历史和当代认同和表述。这篇文章通过介绍美拉尼西亚的观点，重点是音乐，这是反殖民主义表达的一种流行形式，为这种学术做出了贡献。它分两个主要阶段检查人与人和人与文本的接触，以及基于大西洋的黑人权力和黑人的概念。太平洋战争是分界线和转折点，在此期间和之后，这种冲突开始加剧。讨论将这些非洲流散的知识传统/话语/病原学与本土化联系在一起，也就是说，通过对黑人跨国主义的暗喻以及这两种运动解决殖民化经历中产生的“自卑感”的方式，在全球范围内表达了本土性。它显示了特别是在过去的35年中，美拉尼西亚人如何努力颠覆其殖民种族建设的卑鄙意图，并在此过程中帮助创造了现在可能被认为是“黑太平洋”的东西。