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...sugar-cane plantations, idea was to protect the indigenous Fijian islanders from exploitation, expropriation and deracination. Thus he launched a biopolitics of regulation of human resources, paving the way for the ethnic polarisation so evident today between the two major sub-populations of this Pacific island state (see Kaplan 1993:38-41; Kelly and Kaplan 2001:161ff.; Lal 1992:12-16; Lawson 1996:48-52; Ward 1995:199-200). Caught up in this dominant political configuration of ethnic difference and dissonance are the Banabans of Rabi Island, an ethnic minority whose original home was Banaba Island in the Central Pacific. That this community is present at all in contemporary Fiji is the product of an historical parting-of-the-ways, which Gordon was one of the principal agents in bringing about. By then, however, Fiji's former governor was living as a pensioner-of-state in London; and he had been granted a title: Lord Stanmore. As chairman of both the Pacific Islands Company and its legal successor, the Pacific Phosphate Company, he wielded considerable influence in British governmental circles on behalf of the latter's economic and political interests. Thus, Lord Stanmore could not only secure, in 1901, the colonial annexation of phosphate-rich Banaba Island (otherwise known as Ocean Island), he was also able, in the following years, to improve and consolidate the background conditions for industrial-scale extraction of the lucrative phosphate reserves on the island (see Binder 1977:58; Ellis 1935:164-165; Macdonald 1982:97-98; Williams and Macdonald 1985:8-9,49-57).
After Lord Stanmore's death in 1911, the chairmanship of the phosphate company passed to his relative, Lord Balfour of Burleigh. At that time the Banabans found themselves confronting, as an indigenous island community, the first unmistakable signs of the irreversible destruction of their land (te aba) by phosphate mining. Nor was this growing pressure on their lands all: increasingly, the Banabans had to contend with the phosphate company and the colonial administration conspiring to remove them from the island altogether. Deportation and dispersal of the Banabans by the Japanese occupation force during World War II finally furnished the British colonial administration in 1945 with an historical opportunity to resettle the community in Fiji (see Ellis 1946:236-243; Kempf 2003b: 144-154; Maude 1946:12-13; Silverman 1971:147-148; Williams and Macdonald 1985:324-345). Since that time, the relocated Banabans have managed to turn their new home--Rabi is an island in the north-eastern part of the Fijian archipelago--into something of a geographic, political and cultural enclave.
Our contribution looks at reconfigurations of place and ethnicity such as the Banabans have performed, subsequent to their resettlement, in order to turn Rabi Island into a second homeland. We shall pursue the question of how Banaban ties to places and ethnic identities vis-a-vis other groups are reconfigured in the midst of power constellations. Adopting an historical perspective, we will show how Banaban society has re-organised its relation to its 'new island home' (te aba ae bou), Rabi, in memory of its ancestral island home, Banaba. This is to be seen in connection with processes whereby post-resettlement Banabans are constantly reconstituting their ethnic identity in terms of how they relate to, first, the colonial and post-colonial Fijian state and, second, to the other ethnic groups living within that state. We argue that these spatial and ethnic reconfigurations are, at one and the same time, positionings within today's multicultural Fiji. In their relationship to the other parties (both the Fijian government and autochthonous Fijians in the region), the Banabans repeatedly have to articulate and shore up their claim to Rabi Island with their own ethnic identity. Such positionings may be said to constitute an indigenous politics of identity, one directed to securing the survival of Banabans as an autonomous ethnos on Rabi Island.
Transformations of relationships to place--and therefore to land as well--and transformations of identities play a prominent role in the anthropological literature dealing with Fiji. A long line of studies has treated in depth the cultural manifestations of such re-defined land relations, along with the implications these carry for identities of rural ethnic Fijian communities (e.g. Abramson 2000; Dickhardt 2001:198-237; Tomlinson 2002; Toren 1995; Turner 1988; Ward 1995). Much scholarly attention has gone into clarifying how relationships between ethnic groups and also to land were strategically constructed in the national politics of colonial and post-colonial Fiji (e.g. France 1969; Jolly 1992; Kaplan 1993; Kelly and Kaplan 2001; Lal 1992; Lawson 1996:chapter 2; Rutz 1995; Williksen-Bakker 1990). By contrast, we know little of how land relationships and ethnicities have been reconstituted by the performing arts. For this reason, our present focus shall be placed on public performances among the Banabans. First we show that the cultural reconfigurations of place and identity are themselves products of historical processes. Next, we analyse how these cultural reconfigurations of place and identity are currently undergoing reshaping, routinisation and consolidation through such artistic media as music, dance and especially dance theatre (Kempf 2004; cf. Stokes 1994:3-5). Here we build upon a dynamic conceptualisation of performance, feeding into passage, process and practice. Our primary concern is to urge the analytic potential of a concept of performance sensitive to the cultural construction of reality by (at once) historically and culturally situated actors (see Bruner 1996:158-159; Crain 1998:137; Fabian 1990:10-13; Friedman 1998:77-79; Hughes-Freeland 1998:2-5; Schieffelin 1998:204-205). No small importance attaches to this notion of performance, especially if we are to understand the artistic representations of the remembered home island of Banaba and its creative articulation with the new homeland in Fiji. Such a notion lets us transcend essentialising ways of construing spatiality and ethnic identity. From this conceptual perspective we can show how aesthetics and politics interpenetrate and constrain each other when the Banabans enact their spatial and ethnic belonging in the diaspora (cf. Kondo 1996:115-116; Nero 1992:6-10).
For this analysis of reconfigurations historically constituted by the Banabans and now being performed on stage, the present article is indebted to a number of works that have put forward a theoretical concept of articulation (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Hall 1980, 1986; Kaplan 1995) and of positioning (Hall 1996, 1998). Such a concept of articulation we found fruitful for analysing how relationships are established and transformed. According to Hall (1980, 1986) the strength of the concept of articulation is that it signifies not only 'to express' but 'to connect'. 'Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects' (Hall 1986:53). In so arguing, Hall is directing analytic attention to the political aspects of this configuration (Clifford 2000:106; 2001:474-481). By associating the self with discursive formations, these likewise the product of connections, both persons and groups are able to re-constitute themselves as political subjects and to position themselves accordingly (Hall 1986:53-55). In Hall's identity theory, positions are discursively construed places that a subject takes up in order to articulate his or her identities (Hall 1996:6; 1998:291). From this perspective of Hall's, the articulation of social actors with discursive formations can be seen as instances of positioning.
We argue that the Banabans' artistic performances articulate very effectively discourses turning on reconfigured land and ethnicity. This they do by interlinking a multiplicity of discourses and practices rooted in the Banabans' history, their place of origin, their present abode, their ethnic identity, their religion and, not least, their politics--and by expressing these not only through language but through the performing arts. It is by thus articulating themselves that they position themselves today within Fiji.
SPATIAL RECONFIGURATIONS
Stuart Hall conceptualises identity as a form of positioning. Here he uses a spatial metaphor to describe the stance that persons or collectivities adopt within a web of relationships. This mode of relating to the spatial we see as furnishing a new perspective, one that lets us analyse the relationship between people and concrete places in the process of identity construction. When people appropriate localities and landscapes, they endow these spatial entities with their own meanings, thereby constructing for themselves places of intimacy and community, places that become, in turn, part of their identity. We deem crucial in this connection James Clifford's contention that the political dimension of modelling place and identity closely interfaces with specific realities of globalisation: 'Throughout the world, people are caught up in, and excluded by, the powerful currents of capitalist markets, religious movements, and national projects. Embracing and resisting these forces they struggle to position themselves, to establish home bases, sites of collective support and action' (Clifford 2000:96; cf. Clifford 1997:252; Gupta and Ferguson 1997:6-17). In the Banaban case, the driving forces have been the phosphate industry, colonialism and military occupation by the Japanese, factors contributing to this island community losing spatial moorings and sovereignty alike. Against this backdrop of alienation and displacement, we take up the question of how the Banabans were able to reposition themselves following translocation to Fiji, i.e. how they set about transforming Rabi Island into a second homeland.
The Banabans stepped ashore on the island called Rabi on the 15th of December, 1945; they spent their first months in a kind of no-man's-land, living in makeshift tents pitched near where the boats pull in. (1) There was not only a new climate to grow accustomed to but an alien environment, both of which proved formidable obstacles in the early days. After the deprivations of the war years, the people expected rather more from the British colonial administration, which had, after all, put massive pressure on them to relocate to Rabi, than to be put up in army tents and insufficiently provisioned with medicine and foodstuffs. The Banabans felt let down and neglected and stripped of their bearings. The administration had assured them that they could decide, after two years at the latest, whether they wished to remain on Rabi...
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