Where We Speak From—Some Global Visions From Oceania

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.