Maui's sons: a genealogy of return

Abstract

Since 1996, the United States government has been removing record numbers of immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and misdemeanours. These counterflows of migrants have inspired heated debate and moral panic in several 'third world' regions, including the island region of the Caribbean and the Oceanic states of Tonga and Samoa. An interdisciplinary approach rooted to a genealogical program is needed to understand the ways in which the 'criminal deportee' discourse functions as a trope of the master narrative of 'third world' economic labour migration. In this genealogical program, I have sought to excavate statements surrounding discursive identities such as the the sixteenth century Spanish picaro fiction, the nineteenth century thug of India, and the twentieth century cinematic American gangster and North American thug in order to better understand the discursive textures of criminal subjectivities. This research has been approached through a talanoa (talk story) mode of fieldwork in Tonga and has been woven through a life writing mode of representation - a loom which has particular resonance in the academic development of Pacific Studies as an interdisciplinary, often self-reflexive, scholarship. Through this mode I interweave memory work, film criticism, autobiographical writing, and fragments from conversations which all serve to display a particular perspective of the journeys, exiles and returns involved with late-twentieth century movements of Tongan people. In an effort towards re-articulating this genealogical map with a bid for an Oceanic reading, woven throughout is an invocation of and appeal to the legend of Maui, Oceanic tapu-breaker, trickster and ancestor of the tangata moana (the peoples of the sea). It is a story meant to offer the ha (breath of life) for healing and reintegration of forced return migrants.