International Relations
This chapter turns to the varied passages of the sporting body in the first season of Matthieu Donck’s Netflix series The Break (La Trêve) and the routes, connections, and shadow-worlds it reveals. To situate the implications of the migratory flow of bodies and knowledges, we turn to cinematic texts that supply an imagery of the flow of African bodies and the forces that set them in motion, subjecting them to various forms of valuation, speculation, and pain. This is primarily achieved through a reading of African soccerscapes and ethnoscapes in Gerardo Olivares 2007 film, 14 Kilómetros and Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu (2014). The chapter illustrates how different investigative apparatuses enable a series of epistemological and aesthetic breaks that reveal, conceal, or facilitate the trans-continental speculation and recruitment of the ‘superfluous’ Black sporting body and the precarity and desire that accompanies the dynamics of their subsequent use, abuse, and ‘retirement.’
This chapter offers extended ruminations on apocalyptic sublimes by exploring the convergence of racial, nuclear, and pandemic sublimes. Treating the apocalypse in terms of its Greek meaning (apokalupto), we compose a literary and cinematic montage that addresses the pandemic “event” by incorporating critical apocalyptic thinking which opens toward an uncertain future. To make sense of some of the apocalyptic responses to a renewed sense of the fragility of life in the wake of nuclear, racial, and pandemic sublimes, we read two Ingmar Bergman films (Winter Light and The Seventh Seal) alongside a series of philosophical texts that illustrate the way the arts can reveal and unsettle deeply held commitments by creating encounters among diverse sense-making practices that pre-exist the pandemic and other events.
This chapter turns to the very culture of middle-class households to illustrate how the contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labor, among which are young women working in homes abroad. With a focus on subaltern characters, investigations in this chapter treat the way their articulation of their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembène’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, “The Embassy of Cambodia”). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Mahasweta Devi’s short story “The Breast-giver”, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard-cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyze raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical and domestic life, while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.
In 1564, the governor of Peru undertook an expedition to find this mysterious land of bounty, appointing Álvara de Mendaña de Neyra and Hernán Gallego as leads. In February 1568, they spotted the island they called Isabel. In the initial linguistic exchanges between the locals and the voyagers, the indigenous people appear to have acquired their first Spanish word: afuera, loosely translated as ‘get outside’ or ‘go away’. It was a refrain the Spanish explorers would soon hear regularly, shouted at them by Solomon Islanders who ‘wished to prevent [the Spanish] from exploring their country’. The Mendaña expedition is where the documented history of Solomon Islands commences, including the history of an island in the middle of the archipelago known locally as Savo. In the late eighteenth century, a distant world began to impose itself on the Savoans’ island home.
Beyond Solomon Islands, the security pact crystallised the fears of international observers for whom documenting China’s ‘capture’ of Honiara had become a preoccupation. Throughout the rest of 2022, a cavalcade of commentators weighed in on Sogavare’s security deal, often stoking dire warnings in the Australian and international press about the country’s imminent descent into dictatorship. In August 2022 in The Australian, Cleo Paskal and Anthony Bergin coauthored an article detailing the ‘coup’ Sogavare was attempting to mount in Honiara. The catalyst for the article was Sogavare’s absence from a World War Two commemoration. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute investigation into China’s influence in the Solomons focused on traditional and social media and attempted to examine the efficacy of China’s influence activities in the wake of the November 2021 riots.
Five months before Suidani’s appointment as premier, there had been a similarly complicated series of negotiations in Honiara for the position of prime minister. The national election was held in April 2019, but it would be several weeks before Manasseh Sogavare emerged victorious and once again assumed control of his nation. Meanwhile, Matthew Wale’s Solomon Islands Democratic Party, with eight MPs, forged a new grouping of its own, called the Grand Coalition. In making a case for the Switch, Fugui’s committee was not recommending anything out of step with much of the international community. Irrespective of whether the ultimate decision to switch from Taiwan to China was the right one, the murky process that led to such a major policy shift created discomfort in Solomon Islands. In May 2021, as Honiara’s presence in Beijing became formalised, Fugui was appointed Solomon Islands’ first ambassador to China.
This book tells the story of Solomon Islands’ China Switch, its dramatic internal and regional consequences, the political machinations that led to it, and how a handful of Solomon Islanders have used this transformative, once-in-a-generation political event to accrue and wield political power. It is the story of Manasseh Sogavare and his fateful decision to accept the Switch to China, and how it transformed the country. It is the story of Daniel Suidani, and how his manipulation of the Switch thrust him from obscurity to global relevance. Solomon Islands is also the story of the Malaitan activists who have leveraged this political shift to revive a volatile, albeit improbable, quest for independence for their island. It relates how a byzantine web of Pacific business elites changed the political course of their nation in pursuit of commercial gain. And it is the story of how seemingly powerless islanders have the capacity to radically alter the trajectory of a fragile country and a region essential to Australia’s, and the world’s, security. The Solomon Archipelago is a place of joy and beauty. At the same time, it is host to centuries of grievance and tragedy. Enmities fuelled by ancient internal rivalries, colonial dispossession and exploitation, inadequate reconstruction after the Second World War, uneven economic growth since independence in 1978, and the ethnic tensions that gripped the country between 1998 and 2003 undergird cultural, economic and political discourse in contemporary Solomon Islands.
Provincial governments across Solomon Islands sit awkwardly in between the powerful national government and highly autonomous and sovereign tribal communities. New Asia was aware that the Foufoumela community had an appetite for extractive projects. For decades, communities across East Fataleka, the Malaitan ward in which Foufoumela sits, had been home to a small-scale logging operation. Fataleka is a remote area largely isolated from neighbouring regions due to a lack of accessible roads, and it is where Suidani had his political start. Fataleka was also where Knoxley Atu was now residing, after his months of legal troubles in Honiara had begun to subside. The key bureaucratic check on public spending in the province was effectively ignored, which meant some of the spending of the provincial government was technically not allowed under national law.
As the political ramifications began in Taipei, on the ground in Solomon Islands, Taiwan’s aid workers had more practical concerns. After years of integrating themselves into Solomon Islands society, they had been recalled to Taiwan almost overnight. One of Taiwan’s most popular initiatives had been its scholarship program. Taiwan had funded scholarships throughout its thirty-six-year relationship with Solomon Islands. Within days of the announcement of the Switch, Chinese interests had flooded Honiara and other parts of the Solomon Islands, in some cases trying to formalise partnerships with individuals with whom they had been engaging for years. With the Tulagi agreement emerging just weeks after the Switch, commentators critical of Sogavare’s China pivot pounced on the news. For Stanley Manetiva, the Tulagi lease saga was deeply hurtful, embarrassing and politically consequential.
When the author was first sent to Solomon Islands on assignment for The Guardian, his mind was focused on the thrill of having been dispatched to the wilds of the South Pacific to cover arguably the region’s geopolitical event of the decade. First held in 1963, the Pacific Games, formerly the South Pacific Games, have become a central feature of the Pacific’s regional integration. Each of the Pacific Islands’ twenty-two countries, territories and associated states are involved. Then, Sogavare, the Chinese ambassador and representatives from the state-owned construction firm awarded the tender were present. A beaming Sogavare grabbed two shovels and tossed the soil, declaring the 2023 Pacific Games Stadium Project underway.