ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the phosphate trail back out of the aerial hoppers to its origins in one of these Pacific islands. It expresses that diasporic studies focused on the movement of people, or the dispersion and transformation of culture and cultural groups, ignore the significant transformation of physical land and landscape except, perhaps, as consequences of diasporic settlement by highlighting this Pacific island dramatically transformed by colonialism, science, technology, architecture, mining, World War Two and farming in the British antipodes. The chapter explores a corporeal history of moving Banaban lands and bodies within a decolonizing and interdisciplinary Pacific Studies framework. Movement within the Pacific along specific itineraries characterizes much of the social, political and economic life of islanders in both the past and present. Despite all this movement, scientists, artists and other scholars have traditionally approached the islands as insular cultural and ecological laboratories.
