This article identifies and explores an emerging tendency among Melanesians to reenvision their region for the present time. It examines a corpus of popular songs and accompanying videos produced over the last decade that promote regional identity, a phenomenon driven by four factors: diasporic experience as well as a general increase in mobility and global awareness; dissatisfaction with the ruling class; desire to counter negative portrayals of the region abroad; and deep concern over the deprivation of fellow Melanesians' rights to political autonomy. The article demonstrates that this reenvisioning of Melanesianism reiterates key themes of the region's seminal postcolonial thinkers, Epeli Hau'ofa, Walter Lini, Bernard Narokobi, and Jean-Marie Tjibaou; at the same time it develops the concept of wantok-ism and elaborates the idea of "one skin" or blackness as distinctive, thus turning the pejorative associations and experiences of being labeled the black "nesia" into a feature to celebrate. Analysis in the article is guided by a framework that considers the lyrical, musical, and visual devices through which musical Melanesianism is being articulated and projected: mapping, flagging, dancing, and vocality-devices from the "do-it-yourself kit" for performing regionalism.

In the 19th century Melanesians were pejoratively labelled black by European maritime explorers (mela = black; nesia = islands). 1 Emerging scholarship on the Black Pacific (Shilliam 2015; Solis 2015a Solis , 2015b; Swan [as interviewed by Blain 2016]), a parallel to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), focuses on historical and contemporary identifications and articulations ("affinities, affiliations and collaborations" [Solis 2015b: 358]) between Oceanian and African diasporic peoples, cultures and politics based upon shared Otherness to colonial occupiers. 2 The essay that follows contributes to this work by presenting a perspective from Melanesia. It attempts to demonstrate that over time, encounters with Atlantic-based notions of Black Power and négritude, that is, the identity politics associated with Black consciousness, as well as global discourses of Indigenousness, contributed to the production of popular forms of counter-colonial expression, one of the most significantalthough underexplored-of which is music. Encounters with such ideas and expressions occurred person-to-person, sometimes through an intermediary, and also through various kinds of text, often in the form of recorded music, for example. The impact of each type and specific instance is of course unique, and context dependent."Come Independence Come", by the late New Ireland singer-songwriter Phillip Lamasisi Yayii, is probably Papua New Guinea's (PNG) earliest decolonisation song, and was released commercially in 1975, the year in which PNG became independent. Lyrically, the song asks: Can't you leave us alone? Why must you pester us?We have our values that we all are proud of So pack yourself and leave us alone. (Webb 1993: 44-45) Besides expressing a strong desire to shake free of European colonial influence, the lyrics mention pride in local "values". Yayii appears to have

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