Zones of ambiguity and identity politics in Samoa

Abstract

Here I illustrate a deconstructive practice through which indigenes actively resist colonial identity politics. By creating ‘zones of ambiguity’ in the performing arts, indigenes think through colonial images of gender and race. Bhabha’s ‘zones of ambivalence’ characterize contradictions in colonists’ approach to the colonized and self-contradictory identities that colonists force ‘mimic men’ to assume. Zones of ambiguity, in contrast, characterize indigenes’ approach to the hybrid identities that colonists’ ambivalence visits upon them: indigenes purposefully design these zones to transform stereotypic projections and to comment on colonial experience. I explore these ideas through two evening performances in Samoa described in two 1930s travelogues that allude to key figures in Samoan (post)colonial history – the ceremonial virgin (ta¯upo¯u) and the male transvestite (fa’afafine).