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Pacific Literatures as World Literature
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Description
Pacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and suggests a different mode of understanding, viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present, remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty. At the same time, as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and well-being, the Pacific could become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging and care. The Pacific can signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a danger zone of antagonistic peril.
With ground-breaking writings from authors based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and new modes of research – including multispecies ethnography and practice, ecopoetics, and indigenous cosmopolitics – authors explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically grounded range of research themes. This volume aims to decenter continental/land poetics as such via long-standing transnational Pacific ties, re-worlding Pacific literature as world literature.
Table of Contents
Syaman Ranpongan (Pongso no Tao, Taiwan)
Introduction
Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan)
Chiahua Lin (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)
Part I Colonialism: The Pacific Ocean
1. The Wilkes Expedition (1838-1842) and the Formation of a U.S. Empire of Bases in the Pacific
John R. Eperjesi (Kyung Hee University, South Korea)
2. Epeli Hau'ofa's Pronouns
Paul Lyons (University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA)
3. Mountains of Taiwan, Japanese Colonization, and Western Science
Chia-Li Kao (National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan)
4. Demilitarization and Decolonization in CHamoru Literature from Guåhan (Guam)
Craig Santos Perez (University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA)
Part II Indigenous Resistance to Colonialism
5. Decolonizing Guam with Poetry: “Everyday Objects with Mission” in Craig Santos Perez's Poetry
Anna Erzsebet Szucs (Independent scholar, Hungary)
6. Remapping Manoa Valley in Hawaiian Literature
Chia Hua Lin (University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA)
7. Planetary Boundaries, Planetary Imaginaries: Homing Pacific Eco-poetry
Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan)
8. The Ecological Vision of the Ainu Reflected in Their Oral Tradition
Hitoshi Oshima (Fukuoka University, Japan)
Part III Ocean and Ecology
9. Becoming Oceania: Towards a Planetary Ecopoetics, Or Reframing the Pacific Rim
Rob Wilson (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)
10. Island Imaginations, Bioregionalism, and the Environmental Humanities
Kathryn Yalan Chang (National Taitung University, Taiwan)
11. Decolonizing Oceanic Realms: Voices from Australia Pacific
Iris Ralph (Tamkang University, Taiwan)
12. Whale as Cosmos: Multi-species Ethnography and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmopolitics
Joni Adamson (Arizona State University, USA)
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 04 May 2023 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 240 |
| ISBN | 9781501389337 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | Literatures as World Literature |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Pacific Literature as World Literature fruitfully expands the field of transpacific studies … By centering Oceania's writers, essayists, poets, and filmmakers, the collection paints a fluid picture of multiple oceanic histories and ecological imaginaries that re-world the Pacific.
Journal of Asian Studies
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[This] collection embraces Oceania's diversity, while admirably insisting on attending to the specifics of diverse Indigenous Pacific literatures, histories and cultures to 'bring together voices that call for the recognition of the humanity of the Pacific' (p. 9).
Forum for Modern Language Studies
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“This groundbreaking volume remaps the Pacific as a site where poets, scholars, and activists foreground oceanic perspectives to reorient the way we think about literature, culture, colonialism, and relations among species. In this book, scholars based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Europe, Hawai'i, and Guåhan/Guam and decenter continental and nation-based poetics. The contributors to draw our attention to indigenous communities connected across space and time; to legacies of colonization, imperial dominance, and resistance; and to cultures in which mutual dependence and reciprocity play a central role. At a time when climate change forces all of us to rethink the nature of our connections to one another, this volume charts some ways of understanding what those connection have meant over time. It is a book that will be of great importance to literary studies, ecological studies, indigenous studies, and transnational American studies.”
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities, Stanford University, USA
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“The myriad Pacifics in this volume are complexly layered, distinct, flowing into one another. They are perpetually rebecoming with the literatures and epistemologies the volume showcases. What is a world when confronted with a universe? In answer, this book offers an exquisite set of navigations through a world of archipelagoes and an archipelago of worlds.”
Brian Russell Roberts, Professor of English, Brigham Young University, USA, and author of Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (2021)
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“In this evocative collection, the Pacific is not a rim of continental landmasses and imperial ambitions, but an indigenous sea of islands and ecologies that has given us a briny tide of literary riches. Here, writers seek to undo colonial pasts and to elevate a watery world of creatures, waves, and sky. Hsinya Huang, Chia-hua Lin and their contributors demonstrate that Pacific literatures are indeed world literatures, oceanic words that stake the most urgent claims on our planetary future.”
Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University, USA
ONLINE RESOURCES
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