The Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia by David Chappell (review)

On the verge of a referendum concerning New Caledonia’s possible self-determination, The Kanak Awakening provides useful insight into the country’s recent political history, offering purchase on the historical complexity of the contemporary situation. A primary strength of this volume is the nuanced methodology employed by David Chappell, a long-established specialist in Pacific history. The various dimensions that led to the events described by the author are carefully contextualized as he navigates between individual trajectories and collective reverberations, local struggles and large national issues, while keeping the global context in sight. Revelatory focal events are situated historically, and repercussions in the present serve as harbingers of issues that arise over time.

As the title announces, the Kanak political awakening is the book’s singular and salient focus. Chappell highlights the fault lines of this evolving identity along various dimensions including key actors’ life courses, stances on independence or autonomy, reformist or revolutionary orientations, and positions vis-à-vis the urban-rural divide. Outside influences in consolidating this emerging Kanak discourse—for instance, the prominence of socialist influences—are shown to operate in parallel to the revival of custom in Kanak political discourse. As Chappell documents both fault lines and connections, he offers a compelling discussion of the visceral links between culture, identity, and authenticity over the last few decades of Kanak experience in New Caledonia. He is especially sensitive to external exigencies, reminding readers that identities always shape themselves in reaction or even in opposition to others. Given the colonial context and the multiracial environment (in which internal contradictions are not unique to the Kanak community but are a common feature of local experience), any attempt to read regional history in terms of tired dualisms or simplifications is revealed as likely to result in unsatisfactory and inaccurate conclusions. Chappell, however, locates the story of the “Kanak awakening” in concrete events and lived experience, and he presents a specific tribute to the role of students, especially the founders of the Foulards Rouges, for example Nidoish Naisseline and Jean-Paul Caillard, who, torn between their attachment to traditions and their exposure to the French uprisings from 1968, took a leading role in the rising Kanak claims for recognition.

In the first chapter, the author describes the transition from an archaic colonial state of affairs to the post–World War II opening of administrative and political possibility that characterized the 1950s. The Indigénat regime was abolished, citizenship was granted to Kanak, and political reforms seemed to resonate with a sense of a greater autonomy. However, autonomy won was quickly withdrawn under the pressure of President Charles De Gaulle’s search for a faded French prestige, motivated by a nationalist desire to make a comeback on an international stage marked by Cold War tensions and the difficult processes of decolonization.

In the second chapter, New Caledonia’s interrupted decolonization is linked to ongoing French decolonizations and the rise of the Third World countries elsewhere. Moreover, while France attempted to launch a “democratizing decentralization” (71) in some former colonies, its grip on New Caledonia was only hardening under the shadow of a nickel boom. A response to these dynamics, among other things, fueled the commitment of Caledonian students in France, who experienced a transformation from reformists to activists in the 1960s and 1970s (77).

The third chapter grapples with the triple core of the book: “the Kanak awakening,” the birth of the Foulards Rouges, and the radicalization of young activists. If activism started simply, with graffiti and polemical tracts, the French powers replied severely, sending “troublemakers” to prison (76)—where incarceration, with a dark irony contra the state’s apparent intent, became the sign of individual commitment to the national emancipatory struggle for those agents of change. Moreover, while the importance of custom was...