ABSTRACT
Nationalist narratives in the contemporary South Pacific very often revolve around a reified concept of ‘tradition'-a construct which draws on a range of notions concerning culture, custom, ethnicity, and identity. Arguments which urge the pre-eminence of tradition in underscoring the distinctive national ethos of various island peoples are often grounded in the idea that the reassertion of ‘traditional’ ways represents a break away from the negative, and usually racist, legacies of colonial rule towards the construction or reconstruction of a confident, positive, and in some senses ‘authentic’ national identity for former colonial peoples. Edward Said has posed the question: ‘[H]ow does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?’ There are, as Said goes on to illustrate, a number of choices-some more attractive than others. One of the less appealing modes is that which is pursued through the discovery and narration of an ‘essential, pre-colonial self’. This produces, in turn, various kinds of nativistic, radical, or fundamentalist nationalisms (Said 1994:258).
