The whakataukī, or Māori proverb, He waka eke noa—“We are all in the waka [canoe] together”—evolved as a kind of mantra, or catchphrase, for the collective commitment and resilience of the population of Aotearoa/New Zealand during the global COVID-19 pandemic; as a “Team of Five Million” we were “all in this together.” The co-option of an Indigenous worldview as a national positionality was not only utopian; it also operated as a form of gaslighting—an enforced performance of oceanic unity when the reality was widespread disenfranchisement and increasing inequity for Māori. With a more critical motivation, Diana Looser's Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific also adopts the metaphor of the waka/vaka to evoke the mobility and diversity of Pacific citizens traversing within and across islandscapes. Looser's monograph explores “how cultural and artistic performance highlights the ways that the millions of people who inhabit and descend from the Pacific Ocean navigate the environmental, economic, and military exigencies of the contemporary moment” (1–2). Articulated through a mediating paradigm she calls “transpasifika,” Looser employs various intercultural and performance studies theories to address a perceived dearth of performance praxis and critical theory on contemporary work in the Pacific region (3). Looser espouses the notion of etak from the Caroline Islands: a seafarer who occupies a steady, “conceptually immobile” canoe on course within a sea of “moving islands” (3–4). This performative trope, Looser suggests, usefully describes “Pacific creative artists who maintain control of their projects as they weather the vicissitudes of collaboration, funding, and production in local and global contexts” (4).

Like Looser's previous monograph, Remaking Pacific Pasts: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania (2014), this book is highly ambitious in geographical, temporal, and analytical scope. The chapters are arranged thematically rather than regionally, with explorations of Pacific performances of sea voyaging, representations of the impact of climate change for Pacific ecologies and identities, performances of transnationality among practitioners within the global Samoan diaspora, and the vitality of work inspired by urban-based creatives. Looser utilizes her international positionality effectively here to showcase the prescient geopolitical and environmental concerns of this region. The sheer volume of performances explored in the six chapters is overwhelming, covering more than two decades and staged in various sites throughout the Pacific region as well as in the homes of empire. The works discussed are aesthetically and culturally diverse, ranging from scripted realist pieces, intermedial installations, and traditional and transgressive dance works to solo spoken-word performances, stand-up comedy, and interdisciplinary performance art. Looser's writing is heavily contextualized and dense; these are extraordinarily thick analyses that unpeel multiple layers of meaning making borrowed from Indigenous theory alongside a wide range of Western tools. For the most part, Looser is successful in conjuring the dramaturgy of these performances for the reader, although work that relies more on critical script analysis lacks the sense of embodiment, presence, or wairua (spirit) of the work witnessed in person. Among these, I enjoyed the discussion of Lemi Ponifasio and Mau's Birds with Skymirrors, described as

Alongside Looser's review of pieces I'd already encountered—such as Tusiata Avia's powerful Wild Dogs under My Skirt; James Nokise's ironic ode to not being a good stereotype, So-So Gangsta; and the absolute genius lyricism of Courtney Sina Meredith's Rushing Dolls—I was grateful for introductions to Victoria Nalani Kneubahl's screwball time-travel text The Holiday of Rain and Dan Taulapapa McMullin's Pink Heaven, a play that feels like a distant cousin to Victor Rodger's My Name Is Gary Cooper. I appreciate the depth of work that has gone into this project—simply engaging with the scope of the text is truly exhausting—as well as the self-reflexive framing Looser uses in speaking for cultural contexts outside of her own.

However, much has changed since I read (and reviewed) Looser's previous monograph, which I found inspirational and a model guide for how allies should write about us. As an Indigenous, Oceania-based performance academic, I was frequently unsettled by Moving Islands. Although Indigenous ideologies are peppered throughout, Looser repeatedly interrupts these with constructs and theories of theatre and performance studies scholars whose very names trigger negative responses in me that range from mild discomfort to rage perpetuated by epistemological violation. Various performances that I have witnessed are methodically put through a wringer of crushingly complicated theorizations to produce an entirely unrecognizable, flattened performance. Over and over again I questioned: Would these artists recognize themselves in these discussions? To me, this verbosity is detrimental and dated; it recalls “postcolonial” analyses that attempt to validate the worth of othered artists through inaccessible accounts of their work. The postcoloniality of this volume—including its wielding of the contentious term “intercultural”—not only discounts a dominant local trend of fiery, urgent, culturally specific work on regional decolonization, but also takes away what it means—or at least, what it feels like—to embody Oceania. A lack of engagement in this book with contemporary Indigenous conceptions of family, gender, sexuality, and Pasifika youth identities—perhaps an effect of writing from outside our region—overlooks other exciting recent works, such as that of FAFSWAG, the queer, Indigenous, interdisciplinary arts collective based in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa. If transpasifika performance needs a poster child, FAFSWAG should be it.

As Looser reinforces, allyship remains important and vital to ensuring the international dissemination of our work. But there is folly in writing about us without us: If we can't see ourselves, are we really there? In short, we are not in this waka together, and though our courses might intersect, our destinations remain distinct.