This is a rare and excellent book about a region which had to be invented but is nonetheless very real for that. Melanesia, as Hamish McDonald points out early, was defined as islands which were not Polynesia and not Micronesia, and where people generally had blacker skin than those of the other South Pacific islands. Nor did they share, unlike the Polynesians and Micronesians, a common language group. Some speak Oceanic languages, others Papuan ones.
Apart from a geography, which places them mostly to the south west of the rother island group, the name has become simply a modern convenience invented by Frenchman Dumont d’Urville in 1840 on the basis of skin color much darker than those to the east and north and viewed by the Europeans as more backward socially, generally lacking the hierarchical organization of the like of Samoans, Tongans, Hawaiians and Macoris.
But more recently, Melanesians themselves have “appropriated the term, turning it from a derogatory term to a source of pride and self-identification,” to quote a Solomon Islands scholar…
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