Envisioning the Pacific: Dynamic Rim and Empty Void, or Sea of Islands and Littoral Frontier?

The Pacific Ocean has seen increasing interconnectedness and economic development in the modern era, giving rise to talk about a Pacific Century to succeed the Atlantic's modern "unity."  Yet like the Indian Ocean, portions of the Pacific have been routes of human interaction since ancient times, not only along the continental coasts (especially in Asia) but also in the island world of Oceania, which Tongan scholar Epeli Hau`ofa has called a holistic "sea of islands" to overturn discourses that reduce it to scattered, powerless dots on western maps.  Talk of the Asia-Pacific or Pacific Rim still favors the view that Oceania is the hole in the doughnut, but indigenous and recent academic historiography has made the largest region of inhabited islands in the world into a center and the rim a periphery, not because of power, wealth or population but because of its own dynamism for thousands of years and its peoples' will to survive globalization.  Their perspective also permits a more ocean-centered, even indigenous view of world history, rather than seeing oceans as peripheral connecters of continents dominated by hegemonic state systems.  Despite rising seas and modernist addictions, Oceania has also become an intellectual center of resistance against the extinction of world cultural diversity.