Melanesia is the name for the arc of Pacific islands running from New Guinea through the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia to Fiji — a region of extraordinary linguistic diversity settled by humans for some fifty thousand years. It is also a nineteenth-century European racial category, coined for the dark skin of the islanders it grouped together, that many modern Melanesians have both criticized and reclaimed.
In 1832 a French naval officer who had set foot on only a handful of these islands looked at a map of the Pacific and sorted its peoples into three names, arranged by skin color. He called the westernmost cluster Melanesia: the black islands. Two centuries later the label still organizes atlases, universities, and regional politics, even though the people it named never called themselves that, share no single language or government, and include some of the most different societies on Earth living an hour's flight apart.