No abstract

The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnīl-Kijiner and Inuk poet Aka Niviâna from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) raises key questions about the antimonies of climate mitigation and adaptation discourses across oceans and islands. As "sisters of ocean and ice," the poets reference the climate relationships between ice melt in Greenland and sea inundation of the Marshall Islands as part of the extended, but differentiated, island colonial histories of occupation, militarism, and development. Having been brought together by environmental activist organisation 350.org, Jetnīl-Kijiner and Niviâna also strategically use their positionalities as Indigenous islanders to critique not only the continuity between colonial and neo-liberal operations but also the continuity between colonial and environmental scopic regimes, that taken together, stymie climate change imaginaries. In response to these discourses, they claim a feminist hydro-ontological imaginary. Ultimately, the video poem allows an examination of the value of materialist hydro-feminisms and "feminism without borders" (Mohanty, 2003) to extend Island Studies frameworks of the aquapelagic-the assemblage of human interactivity with sea, land, and sky.

This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oceania. In particular, it looks to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner; Hawai‘i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kānaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai‘i. Each artist begins from a particular positionality in the ongoing open weave of the ocean and uses specific cultural ontologies of weaving and netting to address knots and gaps in climate change imaginaries. These weavers help to articulate important nuances in recent calls for working in solidarity networks at the cultural interface of climate justice activism. Their processes directly address the need for greater emotional and relational capacity across cultural and national divides, across Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist critiques of colonial-capitalist systems and through inter-connected waters.

This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists' sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of capitalism, not only as an economy, but as an ideology that materially and systemically reproduces itself within everyday life. Relating the Cold War moment to the development of capitalism after the fall of the communist bloc, the introduction ends by addressing the strategic applicability of Capitalist Realist modes to contemporary art in the neoliberal era.