Book Review - Pacific Literatures as World Literature, edited by Hsinya Huang and Chia-hua Yvonne Lin

Huang, Hsinya, and Chia-hua Yvonne Lin, eds. Pacific Literatures as World Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023.

Book Review by Shane Gomes, Tennessee State University

The collection Pacific Literatures as World Literatures is an ambitious volume that actively tries to define how cultural texts from Oceania[1] should be incorporated into the corpus collectively known as “World Literature” while addressing the specific concerns of the geography, history, and cultures of the Pacific. Cited in the introduction, David Damrosch describes the characteristics of world literature in a blessedly narrow and succinct way, stating “‘A work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’” (7). This collection then strives to not only articulate the importance of the region through its literature, and of the literature itself, but then send it beyond its originating culture(s) to take up space throughout the literary world, endeavoring to “...explore the significance of Pacific literature and re-world it into world literature” (1). Speaking as a professor of world literature, but also as Kānaka Maoli[2] myself, I am intimately aware of how limited the space granted to Pacific literatures in Western literary systems remains. Most of my students’ (and colleagues’) familiarity with Pacific cultural texts begins with Lilo & Stitch (2002) and ends with Moana (2016)[3], demonstrating just how poorly our literary and cultural spaces represent this vast swath of ocean.

More abstractly, the larger goal of this collection is to re-imagine Oceania, in broad terms, as not a border to land masses but as connections between them, focusing on routes and transfer (or transmission, as a collective term) as opposed to land and population centers. Based on that new understanding, the collection presents examples of ongoing cultural revitalization projects and decolonial activism, each vital to redefining the region in the terms of the indigenous cultures and practices that have endured through the ongoing Colonial Age.

The first two sections of the collection, “Colonialism: The Pacific Ocean” and “Indigenous Resistance to Colonialism”, are recounting the history of colonization and many of the organizations that resist and reverse it if possible. While worthwhile individually, the notable contribution of these sections is historicizing many of these events for a broader audience than may have previously been aware of the historic, and ongoing, colonial brutality in places such as Guåhan (Guam), Taiwan, and the Marshall Islands.

The first section begins with “The Wilkes Expedition (1838-1842) and the Formation of a US Empire of Bases in the Pacific” by John R. Eperjesi, a detailed discussion of the mapping mission throughout Oceania funded by US President Andrew Jackson. The mission not only presaged further US domination but also provided the key hydrographic data to allow the colonization to occur, especially through the identification of necessary harbors in Samoa, Hawaiʻi, and Guåhan. The following chapter, “Epeli Hauʻofa’s Pronouns” by Paul Lyons, is a standout in both its precision and its methodological difference from others in the section, offering a close reading of pronouns in the writing of Epeli Hauʻofa (1939-2009), a Fijian writer and major voice in Pacific decolonization. While focused on the usage of possessives, Lyons creates a detailed argument of Hauʻofa conception of who can claim to be part of the Oceanic collective, while simultaneously interrogating how that contrasts with continental perspectives that view Oceania as the industrialized world’s waste dump. Echoing the first chapter, “Mountains of Taiwan, Japanese Colonization, and Western Science” by Chia-Li Kao examines the impact of nature writing and mapping done by the Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano. Kano, much like Wilkes, was hired by his government to map their new territory of Taiwan in the 1930s. But Kao argues that, unlike Wilkes, Kano demonstrated how “Grasping the beauty of nature does not mean that the traveler has the power to control, explain, or manage nature” (63), and provided the foundation for much future Nature Writing that came to provide an affective backing for Environmentalism as a movement. The final chapter in the first section, “Demilitarization and Decolonization in CHamoru Literature from Guåhan (Guam)” by Craig Santos Perez, focuses on the work of three CHamoru writers and activists, Chris Perez Howard, Melvin Wong Pat-Borja, and Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo, and uses their work as a window into the modern history of Guåhan. Its unique geographical and political positions have left CHamoru uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by the US military, which maintains a massive presence on the small island. The chapter explains the colonial history that led to the current state of occupation and the ongoing activism in which CHamoru continue to be denied basic civil rights and representation, despite ostensibly being US citizens. Collectively the four provide a useful grounding in the historic and contemporary impacts of colonialism on the region.

The second section continues the historicizing of the first, while also providing accounts of specific instances of and methods for resistance and decolonization. The opening chapter, “Decolonizing Guam with Poetry: ‘Everyday Objects with Mission’ in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetry” by Anna Erzsebet Szucs, argues for a decolonial strategy of creating an Archive of Things, a physical/digital literature that preserves traditional stories, myths, and practices. Perez’s poetry is an exemplar, using these methods (such as maps and weblinks that are necessary to understand the work) which both preserve traditional narratives and integrating them in contemporary practices of reading and understanding. The next, “Remapping Mānoa Valley in Hawaiian Literature” by Chia-hua Lin, argues that mapping is inherently destructive as, even if not the intent of the mapper, the practice allows for physical and epistemic violence, and commodification of land in a way that is impossible without mapped borders. This chapter most clearly engages with the overall goals of the text, that of a re-imagining of the ocean/waterways as connective instead of isolating, and in doing so articulates a uniquely specific and actionable vision of resistance through the Ka Papa Loʻi O Kānawai, an ongoing restoration project returning the Kānaka Maoli staple crop, Taro, to the Mānoa Valley[4]. “Planetary Boundaries, Planetary Imaginaries: Homing Pacific Eco-poetry” by Hsinya Huang, next examines the Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner usage of poetry to re-inscribe indigenous identity on the Bikini atoll sites. Jetñil-Kijiner’s three-part poem revolving around The Dome, a massive nuclear waste housing, is the foundation of Huang’s argument that “abstract versions of nuclear criticism should be replaced with (is)landed Indigenous voices, practices, and actions” (131). Appropriately to the subject, this article is especially haunting, as the poetry starkly reflects the realities of having your land, traditions, and lives now permanently situated in the fallout of atomic testing. The final chapter of the section, “The Ecological Vision of the Ainu Reflected in Their Oral Tradition” by Hitoshi Oshima, reflects on the unique ways the Ainu, the indigenous peoples of the northern islands of Japan, relate to the natural world. Especially in the context of a culture that relied almost exclusively on hunting, the submissive relationship to the environment stands in stark contrast to the colonial goal of subjugating nature.

The third section, “Ocean and Ecology”, is thematically disconnected from the first two, and instead works to define the region apart from colonial legacies. The opening chapter, “Becoming Oceania: Towards a Planetary Ecopoetics or Reframing the Pacific Rim”, is the most ambitious, defining the poetics for reframing Oceania under the stewardship of indigenous peoples, and as a region of “world-belonging”, or an inescapable part of everywhere else. The author, Rob Wilson, argues that creating a Oceanic poetics is key to resisting the reduction of peoples, islands, and the Pacific itself. The following chapter, “Island Imaginations, Bioregionalism, and the Environmental Humanities” by Kathryn Yalan Chang, discusses the resistance to the building of a petrochemical plant in Taiwan by local and international activists, and poses the work of two of the anti-plant leaders, Sheng Wu and Mingyi Wu, as exemplars of what the environmental humanities can accomplish through local activism. As of the publication of this volume, construction on the plant has not begun, and Chang situates this victory in a discussion of bioregionalism, which strongly argues for sustainability to be the first consideration in economic development of any kind. “Decolonizing Oceanic Realms: Voices from Australia Pacific” by Iris Ralph discusses the Oceanic Imaginary, or the decolonial concept that seeks to undue the western perspective of the region and the violence inherent therein. Ralph examines two Australian texts as demonstrations of the types of violence, physical and epistemic, that European perspectives on agriculture and whaling brought to Oceania as a whole. The concluding chapter, “Whale as Cosmos: Multispecies Ethnography and Contemporary Indigenous Cosmopolitics” by Joni Adamson, finally gives adequate attention to the significance of whales throughout Oceania, an inclusion without which the volume would have been engaging in some cultural erasure of its own. Through readings on Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale and Niki Caro’s film adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider, Adamson details the deep metaphorical and literal connections to whales that exist throughout Oceania. Human ties to them are used to combat the pernicious figure of the “Ecological Indian” in continental North America, and to argue for a transformative indigenous future that is supported, but not limited by, pre-colonial traditions as seen in Caro’s film. These two analyses taken together argue for a “multispecies ethnography” without humans at the center, something familiar to many indigenous worldviews but antithetical to that of colonial powers. The section as a whole provides suggestions for a path forward culturally, one that highlights the uniqueness of the many regions and people that comprise Oceania but that function as a collective in striving for the survival of the Pacific.

Taken holistically, the collection is notably diverse, sometimes disjointed, and always striving to define itself in terms of what has happened to Oceania, and what needs to be done about it. Each article speaks to the editors deep understanding of the region and the issues facing it, and the occasional ruptures in overall organization reflect the content of the chapters themselves and the histories being shared and made. Oceania, despite its tremendous size, is frequently left out of conceptions of world cultures and literatures, perhaps even more so in academia than in the mainstream. This collection presents a series of convincing arguments for how that can change, what is at stake for the people of the region, and what the rest of the world stands to lose if literatures Oceania continue to be ignored.

[1] There is a myriad of terms for this region, but the collection largely settles on the term "Oceania" as it implies that the region is comprised not only of the Pacific itself but also the peoples and cultures rooted there, so this review will do the same. The term is understood to encompasses the cultures, islands, and waters of the regions of Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australasia, and includes nations and territories such as the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Australia, Tahiti, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Taiwan, and parts of New Guinea, Indonesia, and Japan, among others.

[2] Our preferred term for Native Hawaiian

[3] To be fair, neither of these films presents an inaccurate or misleading portrayal of the region, just limited and naïve.

[4] Ironically, the chapter fails to illustrate the contrast the project presents, unless you are familiar with the geography of the area. The growing Taro ponds are almost precisely in the center of Honolulu, one of the largest cities in Oceania, and just minutes from the tourist hub of Waikīkī. The disruption is a clear decolonial statement in and of itself.

Byline:

Shane Gomes, MA, PhD

Assistant Professor of English

Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy

Tennessee State University

Nashville, TN, USA

sgomes@tnstate.edu

He/They

Shane Gomes is originally from Honolulu and grew up in Keaʻau, Hawaiʻi. He earned his BA in Psychology from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, his MA in Literature from the University of Northern Colorado, and his PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture from North Dakota State University. His teaching includes courses on Composition, World Literature, and Tragedy, and his research focuses on Comics Studies, Ecofeminism, Post-Colonial Studies, and Large Language Models in Education. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Tennessee State University in Nashville, TN, USA.