![]() How can we approach these tangled and multiple literatures- a corpus the Samoan novelist and cultural critic, Albert Wendt, has called “the youngest literature in the world” and has theorized as an embodied process of “tatauing the post-colonial body”- without creating neocolonial paradigms or Euro-American distortion of its situated achievements and ongoing emergence? In such contexts of colonial damages and “postcolonial” renewals, one must read texts not just as “literary” icons but as sites of social representation and historical struggle. ![]() This expansive collection of essays, polemics, and interviews raises a textured, timely, and complex (unresolved) set of questions concerning the creation, circulation, and critical reading of contemporary Pacific literature. New cultural voices and under-theorized works struggle to emerge across troubled sites of cultural production: as this collection would substantiate, now is a time of turning things over and (as our title suggests), a time of writing from the inside out. Since Albert Wendt issued his manifesto “Towards a New Oceania” in 1976 and, all the more so, in the wake of Epeli Hau’ofa’s visionary reimagining of this same Oceania as socio-political regional imaginary in “Our Sea of Islands” in 1993, poetry continues to function as a crucial genre in the emergence of the postcolonial Pacific-becoming-Oceania in all its multi- lingual expressiveness and social contestation.9 Poetry becomes part of the ongoing multifaceted political project to reclaim language, place, locality, resource, environment, and nation as seen under threat of displacement and settler hegemony, articulating a translocal vision of the Pacific centered around such an oceanic-based imagination of cosmo-poetic belonging as Wendt and Hau’ofa had advocated."Īs the ever-capitalizing globe rushes headlong into the uncharted waters of the Pacific century, we confront a maze and a mix of literatures and cultural identities breaking down and building up across the Pacific Ocean. "In such postcolonial poetry, the pidginized languages, socially aligned utterances, and experimentalism of form and voice – produced in sites such as Hawai’i, Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Western Samoa, and Fiji – have become all the more tied during the New Millennium to expressive modes of indigenous recuperation, transoceanic interconnection, abjected social history and occluded ethos, and a politically entangled voicing and emplacing of alternative languages, worlding views, codes, and ecological mores. ![]()
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