“More than a Music, It’s a Movement”: West Papua Decolonization Songs, Social Media, and the Remixing of Resistance

In the 1980s, Melanesian musicians began to compose songs protesting the Indonesian occupation of West Papua. Thirty years on, and facilitated through social media, such songs have begun to proliferate across Melanesia, with musicians from elsewhere in Oceania now contributing. The continuing colonial occupation of West Papua has led to the coalescence of a new wave of Pacific-wide performed resistance. In this study, we focus on a corpus of fifty freedom songs that not only are a manifestation of this movement but are also bound up in the digitally enabled remixing and dissemination processes of the identity, unity, and decolonization discourses that drive it. This article explores links between songs, a popular protest medium, and fan-produced accompanying videos and the new-Pasifika discourse of wansolwara (Melanesian Pidgin: shared ocean), which we argue is closely related to emergent understandings of Pacific indigeneity.