Local Europeans of Fiji: Race, Colonialism and Coups

Abstract

This ethnographic account of the Royal Suva Yacht Club's (RSYC) local European community concentrates on the lead-up to and actual 2002 Annual General Meeting. It focuses on the RSYC community's interpretation of the 1987 and 2000 coups, using discourse analysis and archival research. It discusses the way that during talk of their community's decline, local Europeans privilege the notion that they alone have caused this decline, rather than attributing their weakened political, social and economic positions to transformations brought about by the 1987 and 2000 coups. When mentioned, the coups and their political fallout are either placed subordinately in narratives, thus becoming accessory events, or they are satirised. Either way, the coups, which might be read as signifying ethnic Fijian political dominance, are made less threatening for the RSYC's local European community. This thesis considers the efficacy of these discursive strategies. It concludes that in their use of racial discourses local Europeans unwittingly recover and renew past racial elements, which only serve to exhibit and reinforce their community's loss of status and power in postcolonial Fiji.