University of Utah’s School for Cultural and Social Transformation was awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its Pacific Islands Studies program, building on a three-year, $600,000 Mellon Foundation grant it received in 2018 to jumpstart the PI program.
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio will join a virtual event with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Native Studies Forum at New York University on Wednesday, February 16 for a discussion of her new book, REMEMBERING OUR INTIMACIES.
The latest volume of Pacific Asia Inquiry: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, a peer-reviewed online journal by the University of Guam s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, includes manuscripts representing examples of historical, socio-cultural, and philosophical research from the Asia Pacific region. Topics range from the impact of climate change and food security in the Marshall Islands to the Jesuit presence in the Mariana Islands, among others.
Photo: the U.S. Embassy in New Zealand
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The racial classification of Pacific Islanders has long eluded the minds of governments, the general public and, at times, the Pacific Islander community itself. European explorers found the Indigenous people of the Pacific an enigma defying categorization, though the lasting terms of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia stem from French explorer Jules Dumont D’urville’s observation. He had named these groups within a framework of hierarchical racialization, privileging the lighter skin of Polynesians.
University of Utah professor Maile Arvin’s “Possessing Polynesians” is the keystone body of research regarding the racialization of Polynesians in proximity to whites, in which race scientists positioned them as a branch of the Caucasian race, ripe for rehabilitation to a state of civilization. Other racial science posited Pacific Islander origins as being of either Malay or “Mongoloid” inflections, or both. In the mi