Representation as Disaster: Media Discourses on Islands, Climate Change, and Displacement in Oceania

Media representations of what climate change and sea level rise will mean for islands, or whole island states, in the Pacific usually play on the registers of impending doom, of a catastrophe in the making, of looming displacement. The media’s preference for alarmism and simplification is largely based on a combination of long-standing Western imaginings of Pacific islands on the one side and the economic imperative to produce marketable news on the other. Within this framework, three interwoven principles are primarily in play: insularity, concretion and alterity. These are basic building blocks in the discursive linking of climate change and Pacific islands. Four case studies of Pacific islands and/or island states, which in the context of media representations of climate change and sea level rise have risen to become globally circulated emblems of disaster, flight, and cultural loss, will serve to illustrate this narrative scheme. The media’s current practice of associating climate change with Pacific islands – so I conclude – is in many ways a disaster, since it vitiates any differentiated perspective on Oceania as a regional entity with its own historically and culturally specific positionings, problems, and potentials.