New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific

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.

‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania Sudesh Mishra ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance Julia A. Boyd No Ordinary Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’s First Book of Verse Paul Sharrad ‘Our Own Identity’: Albert Wendt, James Joyce, and the Indigenisation of Influence Matthew Hayward Mapping Modernity in Guam: The Unincorporated Ecologies of Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics Bonnie Etherington Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Soaba’s Wanpis, and Oceanian Literary Modernism Paul Lyons Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine Maebh Long ‘[Modernism] in Maori life’: Te Ao Hou Alice Te Punga Somerville Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre: Nina Nawalowalo and The Conch David O’Donnell Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’ Stanley Orr Oceanian Knowing and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove Juniper Ellis On Memory and Modernism: Sudesh Mishra’s Oceania John O’Carroll Oceania, the Planetary, and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda Susan Stanford Friedman

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