Craig Santos Perez’s ‘Praise song for Oceania’ (2016): navigating boundaries in times of planetary change

Referring to decolonial and environmental studies, this paper claims that “Praise Song for Oceania”, a video-eco-poem by Chamorro poet Greg Santos Perez, deconstructs Global North’s boundaries to suggest an alternative, eco-theological, all-inclusive and “response-able” (Haraway) relation to the planet. Investigating the historical causes for planetary change, Perez first denounces the Global North, before extending this responsibility to a Global human scale. Borrowing from Christian and Oceanian cosmologies, he conceives of an eco-theology which restores our spiritual bond to the non-human. Reactivating autochthonous epistemologies, he highlights Oceanian and Oceanic agency and calls for urgent collective action. This video-eco-poem’s combination of English and Oceanian languages, written words, images, orality, modern technologies, human and non-human activities, showcases the need for a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-species cooperation to navigate planetary change.