Geographies of memory and identity in Oceania

Abstract

Taking inspiration from my colleague, Martin Manalansan (2003), I would like to open with an excerpt from Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands: "The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being, people who root themselves in ideas rather than place, in memories as much as material things; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves" (Rushdie 1991:124-125). Such transformation is not without crisis and contradiction. The migrant who grapples with the loss of place-based identity may hold dearly to memories rooting the self in cultural topography even as he or she aspires also to "being modern." From the security of a habitus in which practices and spaces cocreate a common sense, intelligible, foreseeable, and, hence, taken-for-granted world (Bourdieu 1977:80), an immigrant is thrust into a new world of conflicting principles and protean possibilities. Positioned by unfamiliar structures, the migrant struggles to navigate among options directed only vaguely toward imagined and desired cosmopolitan ends. How does intangible heritage fare in such circumstances? And what role, if any, can the tangible and intangible qualities of the past play in guiding mobile subjects? © 2009 Springer Science Business Media, LLC.