Pacific Literatures as World Literature

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.

Hsinya Huang is Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. Her publications include (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women's Writings (2004), Native North American Literatures: Reflections on Multiculturalism (2009), Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures (2014), and Chinese Railroad Workers: Recovery and Representation (2017). Chia-hua Lin is a Ph.D. student in the English Department of the University of Hawai'I at Manoa, USA. She is the recipient of the 2018 Fulbright Graduate Study Grant as well as the 2020 Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (GSSA) from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. She currently serves as a project manager at the Asia Pacific Observatory of Humanities for the Environment.

"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 Guahan/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 * "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) * "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 *