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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Dear Subscribers,
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Join us for the following book launch!
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">My land my life - Dispossession at the frontiers of desire<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><img width="412" height="232" style="width:4.2916in;height:2.4166in" id="Picture_x0020_1" src="cid:image001.png@01DB1342.47569EF0" alt="Book: My Land My Life - Dispossession at the Frontiers of Desire"></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the
basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. <i>My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire </i>explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu
from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography she describes not
simply a linear march toward commodification of the landscape by foreign interests, but a complex web replete with the local powerful Indigenous men involved in manipulating power and property. McDonnell describes land-leasing processes and maps the relationships
between investors, middlemen, and local men. She shows how property is a tool with which foreigners reassert capitalism and neocolonial control over Indigenous landscapes. The legal identity of 'landowner' contains foundational contradictions between the rights
established in Vanuatu’s <i>kastom</i> system and those afforded by property, as individualised rights over land. Property has also created sites for the production of masculine authority and enabled men to manipulate claims to land and entrench their personal
power. This book explores how transactions of customary land have created new domains of agency and frontiers of desire: foreign desire to possess land and local desire to lease land for cash. It concludes with a discussion of Vanuatu’s constitutional and
land reform package, drafted by the author, which took effect in 2014 and delivered a more empathetic approach to Indigenous land rights and ended the land rush.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">The seminar will include a short discussion of the book by the author, Siobhan McDonnell, followed by the launch of the book by Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, The Hon
Ralph Regenvanu.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Event details<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Date and time: Thursday, 10 October, 12-1pm
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Venue (in-person): Canberry/Springbank room JG Crawford Building<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Venue (online): Zoom<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><u><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans""><a href="https://pacificinstitute.anu.edu.au/event/book-launch-hon-ralph-regenvanu-my-land-my-life-dispossession-frontiers-desire">REGISTER HERE</a><o:p></o:p></span></u></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">Kind Regards,
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Public Sans"">ANU Pacific Institute<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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