Their-Our Sea of Islands: Epeli Hau'ofa and Frantz Fanon

Abstract

1. HACHA - ACTUALLY EXISTING COLONIALISM
It is an intriguing piece of trivia, that amongst the 16 remaining official colonies in the world left today (as recognized by the United Nations) 14 of them are islands in the Pacific, Atlantic or Caribbean." One of arguably the most successful mandates of the UN has been its efforts at decolonising the world and moving the world from one which was mostly colonies and empires, to today, one which is mostly independent nations. This year of 2010 ends the second decade of UN attempts to eradicate colonialism from the world, a task which Corbin Carlyle, an international observer, notes is failing at miserably. Part of the reason for this is that colonialism and therefore decolonisation have lost contemporary meaning for scholars, and are notions which only exist to invoke the racism of the 19th century or the failures of the Third World Project Vernet). Both are things most people might rather forget.