Professor Brij V. Lal Award
The Contemporary Pacific is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Professor Brij V. Lal Award, “‘Kaneka Is Our Reggae’: The Soundtrack of the Kanak Political Claim,” by Dr. Matteo Gallo, published in the journal’s spring 2024 issue (36:1).
The award honors Professor Brij Vilash Lal, an eminent Pacific historian and writer and the founding editor of The Contemporary Pacific, who passed away on 25 December 2021. Professor Lal, or Brij as he was fondly known among friends, was a trailblazing scholar who authored numerous books and articles that helped shape the field of Pacific history. His work focused largely on Fiji’s history and politics and on Indo-Fijian/Girmit history and the Indian diaspora. Later in his life, he also published short stories that reflected on his life and journeys.
Consistent with the broad-ranging focus of The Contemporary Pacific, and with Professor Lal’s own research and writings, the winning article or paper may come from any discipline, including creative writing, that highlights the very best of critical thinking and scholarship within Pacific studies. Papers eligible to be considered for this year’s award appear in the article and dialogue sections of the journal’s spring and fall 2024 issues.
The review committee celebrated this year’s winner for its “engaging and extensively researched history of the rise of a new musical genre in New Caledonia and its direct ties to the Kanaky independence movement,” as well as the author’s “passion for and engagement with the subject and the local community, via both documentary evidence and interviews with several of the principals.”
Similarly, the Lal family appreciated the article’s focus on music, noting: “Possibly Dad’s favourite past-time was playing music and singing (badly) alongside his more musically talented brothers and sisters. Whilst his favourites were most often the film songs and ghazals (love songs) from India—Anup Jalota, Mehdi Hassan, Jagjit Singh—and less the reggae of Bob Marley and UB40 that his kids grew up with, he was deeply attuned to the cultural and social power of songs. Brij was very supportive of the Kanak movement and their fight for independence, even if he was not familiar with the Kanak music. He would have delighted in the rigorous scholarship, interdisciplinary research, and excellent writing of this article by Matteo Gallo, which amplifies the voice of the Kanak people and its resonance with the cultural and political stories of the time. It’s a highly deserving winner of this year’s Brij V. Lal Award—sincere congratulations to the author and to The Contemporary Pacific in bringing this important scholarship to light.”
The editor of The Contemporary Pacific, Professor Katerina Teaiwa, shared her support for the committee’s decision and expressed congratulations to Gallo for “his insightful work on music and politics in Kanaky.”
Gallo is a FWO Senior Postdoc fellow at KU Leuven and researcher associate at CREDO in Marseille. His research focuses on the politics of memory, the repatriation of archives, music sovereignty, and local practices of heritage transmission, with specific attention to the artistic practices of youth. In 2020, he graduated with a PhD in anthropology from the universities of Verona and Venice. For him, the award is especially meaningful: “This recognition is not only an acknowledgment of my own research, but also a tribute to a lesser-known history of the Kanak people’s struggles for self-determination and to its key figures. It carries even greater significance at this pivotal moment for Kanaky New Caledonia. As Professor Lal reminds us, history is a fundamental tool to understand contemporary dynamics.”
Read “‘Kaneka Is Our Reggae’: The Soundtrack of the Kanak Political Claim” online here: https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2024.a956786
– TCP Staff, 20 August 2025