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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Beyond Exile: The Ramayana As A Living Narrative Among Indo-Fijians In Fiji And New Zealand, Kevin Miller
Beyond Exile: The Ramayana As A Living Narrative Among Indo-Fijians In Fiji And New Zealand, Kevin Miller
Kevin C. Miller
Drawing on the themes of collective memory, cultural ideologies, and narrative constructions, this chapter proposes to examine the narrative of the Ramayana epic, its exegesis through performance, and its continued relevance to identity formation among Indo-Fijian Hindus both within Fiji and its Pacific Rim diaspora. Based on the recasting of the “twice-migrated” Indo-Fijian as the “twice-banished” by certain observers, we might expect the meaning of the Ramayana in the lives of Indo-Fijian Hindus in New Zealand to shift towards the theme of Rama’s exile, just as it did for the indentured laborers who made the original journey to Fiji. Nevertheless, …
Choreographing (Against) Coup Culture: Reconciliation And Cross-Cultural Performance In The Fiji Islands, Kevin Miller
Choreographing (Against) Coup Culture: Reconciliation And Cross-Cultural Performance In The Fiji Islands, Kevin Miller
Kevin C. Miller
No abstract provided.
A Community Of Sentiment: Indo-Fijian Music And Identity Discourse In Fiji And Its Diaspora, Kevin C. Miller
A Community Of Sentiment: Indo-Fijian Music And Identity Discourse In Fiji And Its Diaspora, Kevin C. Miller
Kevin C. Miller
Through an historical and ethnographic account of Indo-Fijian music and related cultural practices, this dissertation examines the co-implicative relationship between music making and collective identity formation. Indo-Fijians, who compose about 37 percent of Fiji’s current population, descend primarily from colonial-era Indian laborers. Specifically, I interpret discourses about music and discourses of music to query three broad intersections of musical performance and “community”: 1) the “subethnic,” in which the heterogeneous “Indo-Fijian community” negotiates internal difference; 2) the national, in which fraught social and political relationships between Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians—the majority population—inhibit their co-authoring of the nationstate; and 3) the transnational, …