1st Edition

New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific

Edited By Matthew Hayward, Maebh Long Copyright 2020
    288 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    288 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist studies’ critical map. Yet, as the chapters of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific collectively show, Pacific artists and writers have been as creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity as any of their global counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century, driving a still ongoing process of decolonisation, Pacific Islanders forged an extraordinary cultural and artistic movement. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of other influences — realist novels, avant-garde poetry, anti-colonial discourse, biblical verse, Indian mythology, American television, Bollywood film — Pacific artists developed new creative registers to express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities. New Oceania presents the first sustained account of the modernist dimensions of this period, while presenting timely reflections on the ideological and methodological limitations of the global modernism rubric. Breaking new critical ground, it brings together scholars from a range of backgrounds to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars, and the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars.





    1. ‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies


    2. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward







    3. ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania




    4. Sudesh Mishra







    5. ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance




    6. Julia A. Boyd







    7. No Ordinary Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’s First Book of Verse




    8. Paul Sharrad







    9. ‘Our Own Identity’: Albert Wendt, James Joyce, and the Indigenisation of Influence




    10. Matthew Hayward







    11. Mapping Modernity in Guam: The Unincorporated Ecologies of Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics




    12. Bonnie Etherington







    13. Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Soaba’s Wanpis, and Oceanian Literary Modernism




    14. Paul Lyons







    15. Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine




    16. Maebh Long







    17. ‘[Modernism] in Māori life’: Te Ao Hou




    18. Alice Te Punga Somerville







    19. Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre: Nina Nawalowalo and The Conch




    20. David O’Donnell







    21. Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’




    22. Stanley Orr







    23. Oceanian Knowing and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove




    24. Juniper Ellis







    25. On Memory and Modernism: Sudesh Mishra’s Oceania




    26. John O’Carroll







    27. Oceania, the Planetary, and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda




    Susan Stanford Friedman

    Biography

    Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand





    Matthew Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of the South Pacific