Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and
use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and
rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these
traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation--
fonua--which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern
nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the "multi-territorial
nation," the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is
mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity.
The globalized nation the women build through gifting their
barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations
are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work
suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of
globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily
involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New
Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and
throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities
centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional
cultural forms in unprecedented ways.
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