12 noon at Hamilton Library 306
We can imagine the future from an Indigenous point of view. Pasifikafuturism looks to Indigenous Pasifika culture, our past, our cultural practices, our science, in the writing of science fiction. Ancestral navigational knowledge of wayfinding across the vast Pacific Ocean entity, provides an imaginative metaphor for finding our way in the present and envisioning transformative future pathways in science fiction.
This talk is presented by the Center and Department for Pacific Islands Studies with the Department of English and the Hamilton Library Pacific Collection.
Gina is a freelance writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau and joins CPIS as the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer Fellow for Fall 2023. She was the inaugural Pasifika curator at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021 and holds a PhD in creative writing from Massey University and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her collection of short stories, Black Ice Matter, won Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. She is a science fiction nerd and when she enrolled to do a PhD in Creative Writing at Massey University, she decided to write science fiction – especially stories set in space. There is hardly any science fiction written by Pacific writers or featuring Pacific characters – Gina wanted to change that. Her latest book, Na Viro – the first in the ‘Turukawa Trilogy’ – is a work of Pasifikafuturism, a term coined in her PhD thesis. Pasifikafuturism was inspired by Afrofuturism, written by African American writers, and Indigenous Futurism written by First Nations writers from America.
