Literature Compass最新文献

Oceania is always already home to vast global relations. In this introduction we invite readers to navigate literary and other creative expressions emerging from these relations in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Critic Epeli Hau‘ofa (1993) disrupts colonial and capitalist constructions of the Pacific that frame its islands as sparse and isolated, and reminds the world that ‘Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding’. Prior to Hau‘ofa's assertions, Albert Wendt points out that creative works allow people to engage with the diverse connections and mobility that Oceania makes possible. More recently, Alice Te Punga Somerville reasserts that the beings and lands of Oceania do not fit into the categories forced by colonial borders, as ‘Oceania proposes a dynamic regional sensibility that enlarges and puts pressure on contemporary structures of nature and region’. Yet, there are few publications, especially emerging from UK and European publishers, that prioritise the globality of Oceania expressed through its literatures. Entering the conversations sustained by scholars of Oceania, this special issue on ‘Some Global Visions from Oceania’ asks readers to think about what the ‘global’ looks like when centred in Indigenous Oceania, rather than in a Euro-American centre.

So much critical work about English language fiction by Indigenous writers from Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is Eurocentric. Although Papua New Guinean writer-scholar Steven Winduo argued 2 decades ago for the need to unwrite Eurocentric views of an ‘imagined Oceania’ and Māori writer Keri Hulme wrote disparagingly of Anglocentric ‘gods of Literature’, Samoan fantasy writer Lani Wendt Young has more recently described traditional publishing houses as ‘white castles of literature’. Indigenous peoples across Kiwa's great ocean do not need the empire's eyes. Māori do not need the empire's eyes; we have seen ourselves in our narratives since our primordial parents, Ranginui and Papatūānuku, were separated. Yet too often, Indigenous wāhine bodies in fiction are read as stereotyped features of indigeneity or are simply ignored. As a single connecting node to the wider literary networks of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, this paper recentres oft-overlooked Indigenous rhythms and offers a wahine Māori reading of wāhine Māori lives in stories written by wāhine Māori. Specifically, this essay recentres wāhine Māori lives by weaving together extracts of the poem, ‘this tauiwi house’, with contemplations of wāhine bodies in two short stories written by wāhine Māori: ‘Flower Girls’ by Patricia Grace and ‘Birth Rights’ by J. C. Hart. Ultimately, careful readings of wāhine bodies offer rich insights into the wider tapestry of Indigenous lives and the societies we inhabit across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa.

This article explores the multiple contexts behind ‘The Viole(n)t Cat’ by expatriate poet, Sāmoan Dan Taulapapa McMullin, now resident in the US. It is especially concerned with the ways in which the poem crosses national and hemispheric boundaries while remaining embedded in multiple instances of the local and translocal. While the poem begins in Turtle Island, it soon considers the twin islets of Ofu and Olosega in American Sāmoa, places of striking natural features. While evoking this beauty, the poem also suggests the significance of the strait between the islands and its notable role as a symbol of the long and intertwined relationship between Sāmoa and Tonga over many centuries. The wider context of ongoing Polynesian longing and mobility, producing not only the Polynesian triangle itself but also its contemporary diaspora, evokes the original homeland, Hawaiki, as both literal origin and ongoing ontological sustenance.

Tahitian author Célestine Vaite's novels Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004), and Tiare in Bloom (2006) are set in 1970s Tahiti and written mainly in English, but they feature numerous occurrences of French, the colonial language of Mā‘ohi Nui (French Polynesia), Tahitian, the most spoken Indigenous language of the region, and Franitian, often referred to as Tahitian-French, a vernacular born from the cohabitation of French and Tahitian. The literary multilingualism of Vaite's books constitutes an active medium of diasporic and Indigenous identity assertion. Drawing from Pacific concepts of diaspora, Indigeneity, and postcolonialism, I explore how Vaite's languages reflect Pacific connections and actively sustain links between Pacific peoples, notably through colonial critiques and the thematic of movement. Mā‘ohi scholar Kareva Mateata-Allain uses the metaphor of the va'a (the Tahitian canoe) to posit literature as a tool that enables crossing the invisible, colonial barriers between Francophone and Anglophone regions and peoples (2005, 2008). Considering the isolating power of the French language in a region dominated by English, Mateata-Allain's approach underlines the wish of Mā‘ohi authors, including Vaite, to prioritize common Pacific experiences. Since Vaite's stitching of languages defies conceptions of linguistic zones in Oceania, I consider her use of English and of her three native languages from Mā‘ohi Nui as a strategy that decentralizes cultural experiences and identities and relocates them in a literary space that is uniquely hers.

While there is a large amount of literary research and prose produced about the Pacific, only a small amount of work considers Indigenous interpretation and production of literature within the region. This essay explores the potential of Indigenous concepts in literary analysis and creative writing practice from a Māori perspective, Māori being the name of the Indigenous people of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, located near the centre of the Pacific Ocean. By applying the Tīvaevae framework, a Cook Islands research method most often used to inform research in education, social sciences and quantitative research, creative writing becomes a collaborative process that mimics the crafting of tīvaevae quilts. The article also discusses how the archetype of the calabash breaker, based on the Tusitala Marsh poem, was engaged during this process. It concludes with a discussion on what it means to be a Māori writer in an academic environment that calls for ‘Pacific scholars’.