The research question underlying the following article concerns first and foremost the imaginaries that construct the particular power and knowledge that attach to Kanak forms of post-coloniality. The centrality of place in these imaginaries from the margins of the French \u2018country sui generis<\/em>\u2019 that is present-day New Caledonia, and their remarkable variance from European norms, makes their study of considerable pertinence to the topic of this issue (perceptions of peripherality).<\/p>\n

In the most recent and political Oceanian imaginary, New Caledonia is less a distant appendage of France or Europe, or a far flung island in a vast Pacific ocean, than an integral part of what the Tongan writer Epeli Hau\u2019ofa called \u201cOur Sea of Islands\u201d: a Pacific region populated 3000 years before our era by peoples speaking Autronesian languages who crisscrossed the Pacific in their voyaging canoes, marking their passage and interrelationships with their distinctive Lapita pottery. Oceania was then a sea of connected islands, of constant migration, of islands linked to each other rather than to Europe even after the arrival of the first sailing ships seeking the great southern continent that would balance Europe. (A visit to the Auckland Maritime Museum with its animated cartoon of the heroic pioneering voyage of Maori from Hawaikii-Oteiti to pristine Aoteorea-New Zealand provides evidence for the current centrality of this imaginary of \u2018routes\u2019, of legendary voyaging.) Many of the indigenous Pacific populations also identify with a further grouping, that of the world\u2019s \u201cFirst Nations\u201d and in this case, most particularly with their uprooting, their dispossession from their lands; that is, with roots rather than the differently powerful imaginary of routes or migrations to colonize new Pacific lands. (This imaginary of voyaging is less useful, even counter-productive, for the on-going processes of re-claiming taken lands.)<\/p>\n

These South Sea islands discovered for Europe in the eighteenth century are, then, connected Oceanian (is)lands, peopled by tangata whenua<\/em> or \u2018people of the land\u2019 as M\u0101ori, for example, designate themselves. They are also, since annexation in 1840 (in New Zealand) and in 1853 (in New Caledonia), English- and French-speaking regions of the world whose populations derive predominantly from nineteenth-century European colonisation of the Pacific and, as in New Caledonia, the penal and indentured labour that often accompanied European economic exploitation and colonial development.<\/p>\n

The Kanak woman writer, D\u00e9w\u00e9 G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9, on whose work this paper focuses, was among the first Kanak to study at university level, completing a BA degree (Licence-\u00e8s-Lettres<\/em>) in 1972 at the University of Montpellier in France. After her return to New Caledonia, G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9 became both an activist within the indigenous independence movement and the first published Kanak writer, exploring a sense of loss and exile from her own colonised culture but, paradoxically, also a strong sense of distinctive Kanak being. It is in landscapes, weather, geographical features, places of communion with nature and the creatures that dwell in it, with others, the ancestors, \u201c\u00eatre seul \/est\/ \u00eatre avec\/u<\/em> et du\u00e9e<\/em>\/ceux que l\u2019on ne voit pas\/autour de nous\/et qui sont partout\u201d (\u201c\u00eatre seul\u201d, Sharing as Custom Provides<\/em> 76), that her texts, like the unpublished texts of her father, Waia G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9 before her and of her paternal and maternal grandfathers, the pastors Philippe G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9 and Eleisha Nabaye, before them, constitute the basis of an authentic Melanesian person, of memory, feeling, and identity.<\/p>\n

The description of the panels on \u201cImagining a Sense of Place: The City, the Region, The Border\u201d in the Program of the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference held in Paris in July 2012 opened up the topic of a \u2018sense of place\u2019 with the premise that, as is also noted in the Introduction to this special issue, \u201ccities are routinely metonymically articulated to the nation state, and urban imaginaries mobilize notions of cultural cohension derived from the national.\u201d Yet, under the conditions of (increasingly late) modernity, \u201curban culture as a contact zone and port(al) of entry has been characterized by cultural exchange, hybridity and cosmopolitanism, a border in a cultural and identitarian, rather than a geopolitical sense [\u2026] Cities are anchored in a hinterland […]. Regions interact with, support, or counterbalance national imaginaries\u201d (ibid.).<\/p>\n

D\u00e9w\u00e9 G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9, like her father and grandfathers, situates her writing resolutely in just such a hinterland, in a parti-pris of Kanak indigeneity, close to the land and to the tribu<\/em> \u2013 that is, at once the place, the indigenous village\/customary lands, and the people who inhabit the village\/customary lands. By definition, the tribu<\/em> lies outside the French capital, Noumea, closely related to the traditional chefferie<\/em> but also, since colonisation, including spaces reserved for the church, Protestant or Catholic. The tribu<\/em> has largely counterbalanced the imaginary of Noumea la blanche<\/em> in a mainstream imaginary that privileges the colonial town and adds a third term, the colonial Bush of rural white settlement, to overlay the space of the tribu<\/em>. However, G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9\u2019s 2005 novel, L\u2019Epave<\/em>, her partially autobiographical Graines de pin colonnaire<\/em> (2009), and more recently, T\u00e2do, T\u00e2do, W\u00ea\u00ea ! ou \u201cNo more baby\u201d<\/em> (2012), also increasingly include scenes set in the French capital: the commercial centre and Kanak gathering space of the Place des Cocotiers in L\u2019Epave<\/em>; Rivi\u00e8re Sal\u00e9e, a Kanak residential suburb in Graines de pin colonnaire<\/em>. The shanty towns that mark the gateway to the city and line the mangrove within it figure centrally in her poems and short stories. In G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9\u2019s articulation of places of identity outside, on, and across the political, cultural and ethnic borders that have defined Kanak, her writing practices re-negotiate the urban\/regional or Noumea\/Bush\/Tribu<\/em> nexus to counterbalance or contest national (French) imaginaries.<\/p>\n

In her discussion of M\u0101ori film titles such as Mauri<\/em> and Ng\u0101ti<\/em>, Deborah Walker-Morrison presents New Zealand Maori film as the construction of a T\u016brangawaewae<\/em>, a Place to Stand that centres on the traditional taonga<\/em> (treasures) of land and water. In G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9\u2019s text the geographical features of the land, mountains, rivers, waterholes, coastline, stars, trees and plants are inextricably linked with, indeed the foundation of, the Kanak social world. The spring, like the rain water that enters the pores, is identified explicitly by Ut\u00ea M\u00fbr\u00fbn\u00fb with her grandmother. (\u201cJe pense \u00e0 la source qui nourrit les tarodi\u00e8res o\u00f9 \u00e0 l\u2019eau de pluie qui p\u00e9n\u00e8tre les pores\u201d Ut\u00ea M\u00fbr\u00fbn\u00fb<\/em> 19). In their turn, the tertres<\/em>, or mounds of earth on which Kanak cases<\/em> (thatched houses) have been built, the networks of taro terraces and yam gardens, mark the landscapes with Kanak social organisation, tracing out the pathways of matrimonial alliance and socio-political claims to land. Rows of masculine columnar pines and feminine coconut palms indicate the emplacement of a chiefly house left by the ancestors, customary pathways or landmarks for the failing memory, \u201cvoies coutumi\u00e8res\u2026traces rep\u00e8res pour la m\u00e9moire qui d\u00e9faille\u201d (Ut\u00ea M\u00fbr\u00fbn\u00fb<\/em> 11). G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9 is the name of a place, the geographical area that gives the extended G\u00f6r\u00f6d\u00e9 family its identity. It is also a genealogy; toponym is patronym, much as Kanak\u00e9, the first ancestor of the Paic\u00ee foundation story from oral tradition, is the familiar landmark-mountain that D\u00e9w\u00e9 can see from her garden. Despite their voyaging waka<\/em> (which in L\u2019Epave<\/em> is figured as an abandoned wreck in the tribe\u2019s canoe graveyard), these Kanak peoples too, imagine themselves predominantly as tangata whenua<\/em>, as autochthonous, that is, etymologically, as people springing directly from, or rooted in the earth, not unlike the ancient Spartoii of the classical Greek myth of Oedipus.<\/p>\n