Traditional Seafaring in Oceania

In this book, Hunter H. Fine examines traditional seafaring practices in Oceania to establish a fuller understanding of the ways in which our everyday practices can illuminate aspects of power, representation, social advocacy, and truth.

Fine considers how circulatory maritime voyages resulted in a shared network of practices and knowledge that have been passed down to the descendants of these seafaring cultures, who still engage in and teach them in present day, most prominently in Micronesia. Positioning the voyages themselves and the practices that enabled them as embodied forms of writing and theory-both in everyday life and as public performances of social advocacy-Fine proposes a critical theory based in both traditional seafaring and poststructuralist rhetorical theory.

Through this new framework, the book illustrates how an Indigenous body of knowledge has formed the foundations for contemporary maritime practices, how it has functioned as both domestic and international advocacy and resistance, and how these various practices work together to provide an epistemological alternative to Western modernity/coloniality.