Provocative readings in intransigent archives finding Aneityumese women

Anticolonialists - my past self included - tend to read colonial texts with hostile but liter al eyes, assuming that colonial intentions were realised and taking at face value colonisers' representations of their own centrality for indigenous people. In such discursive settings, indigenous - especially female - agency is likely to be elided or denied. I argue instead for a reading strategy that decentres colonial representations by identifying and decoding the traces of indigenous actions and presence which are sedimented in, and surreptitiously help shape, dominant texts. Decentred, such representations are susceptible to reverse colonisation: to appropriation and exploitation in writing historical narratives which can envisage indigenous agency and naturalisation of the alien and the novel in even the most repressive colonial arenas. I illustrate the principles and method via a narrative vignette which exemplifies, interrogates and exploits demeaning missionary tropes for indigenous women in mid-nineteenth century Aneityum, Vanuatu. The story evokes key issues in the politics of representation: the need to problematise assumptions that the discursively dominant are necessarily central in subaltern affairs; the need to dislodge the romanticism and ethnocentrism which bemoan the involvement of indigenous women in Christian domesticity, especially sewing, because it looks like submission to missionary hegemony.