Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings, Performances and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The specific constellation of ethnic groups in present-day Fiji derives, in large part, from colonial displacements that made that country home to multiple diaspora communities. When Sir Arthur Gordon, the first governor of Fiji, imported indentured labourers to work the sugar-cane plantations, his idea was to protect the indigenous Fijian islanders from exploitation, expropriation and deracination. Thus he launched a biopolitics of regulation of human resources, paving the way for the ethnic polarisation so evident today between the two major sub-populations of this Pacific island state (see Kaplan 1993:38-41; Kelly and Kaplan 2001:161ff.; Lal 1992:12-16; Lawson 1996:48-52; Ward 1995:199-200). Caught up in this dominant political configuration of ethnic difference and dissonance are the Banabans of Rabi Island, an ethnic minority whose original home was Banaba Island in the Central Pacific. That this community is present at all in contemporary Fiji is the product of an historical parting-of-the-ways, which Gordon was one of the principal agents in bringing about. By then, however, Fiji's former governor was living as a pensioner-of-state in London; and he had been granted a title: Lord Stanmore. As chairman of both the Pacific Islands Company and its legal successor, the Pacific Phosphate Company, he wielded considerable influence in British governmental circles on behalf of the latter's economic and political interests. Thus, Lord Stanmore could not only secure, in 1901, the colonial annexation of phosphate-rich Banaba Island (otherwise known as Ocean Island), he was also able, in the following years, to improve and consolidate the background conditions for industrial-scale extraction of the lucrative phosphate reserves on the island (see Binder 1977:58; Ellis 1935:164-165; Macdonald 1982:97-98; Williams and Macdonald 1985:8-9,49-57).