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.
"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."
