Expanding Terra Nullius

Abstract

In an essay challenging characterizations of Pacific nations as “small” and “isolated,” Epeli Hau‘ofa described precolonial Oceania as “a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers” (1994, 154). Summoning the vision of an oceanic world in which the seas connected rather than separated people and cultures, movement was integral to life, and boundaries were negotiated points of entry rather than imaginary dividing lines, Hau‘ofa wrote that “the sea was open to anyone who could navigate a way through” (1994, 155), and he famously put forward a worldview radically different from the one Anglo-European colonialism violently imposed on Oceania, including ideas of territorial sovereignty, possessive individualism, and white supremacy (Mar 2016).