In the Midst of Doubled Imaginaries: The Pacific Community as Diversity and as Difference

Abstract

How shall we understand the signified "community" as in a Pacific Community? Conventional understanding of "community" privileges community understood as diversity, a collective of multiple identifiers of cultures and nations (as in multiculturalism or multinationalism). Postcolonialists, like Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, claim that such imaginary is inscribed in "democractic liberalism," suppressing, concealing, and containing the imaginary of "community as difference." In this article, the author calls upon readers to move boldly into the interspace midst these two imaginaries, and claims that though it is a site of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, it may be a site of generative possibilities and hope for newness, a site of becoming in struggle.