When Margins Are Centres: De-ranging Pitcairn Island’s Place in Pacific Scholarship

Abstract

Pitcairn Island, settled in 1790 by nine mutineers of the British naval vessel Bounty and 19 settlers from Tupua‘i, Huahine, Ra‘iātea and Tahiti, has long maintained an ambiguous status in Pacific scholarship. On the one hand, its attachment to a storied moment in British history and its supposedly remote geographic location have granted it outsized attention. On the other, it has sometimes suffered a concomitant neglect, treated as peripheral to the primary concerns of Pacific studies. In this joint article, seven scholars of Pitcairn Island argue that the island’s seemingly contradictory status as both central and marginal can be read as the result of disciplinary attentions and forgettings, a series of oublifications and focalisations. Moreover, metacritical attention to the ways the island has been made marginal or central to historical, sociocultural, political or regional discourses in turn reveals some of the structures and assumptions undergirding the disciplines engaged in the study of Oceania. Though Pitcairn Island, founded on mutiny and murder, is sometimes described as a space of derangement, we argue it is our own disciplines that are deranged through their study and use of an island that sits uneasily in the categories to which we have subjected it. Thus, we critique surprisingly recurrent notions that islands such as Pitcairn should ever be framed as pristine laboratory spaces or ready-made model systems. We conclude by positing the relevance of an alternative oceanic historicity that looks beyond the colonial archive to de-range supposed margins like Pitcairn Island.