Pacific Literatures

This course examines literatures of the Pacific. We begin with the ancestral connections between Pacific Islands, travel through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as we interrogate the entanglements of European imperialism and native Pacific sovereignty, through to the role of the Pacific in World War II and the Cold War before landing in the twenty-first century and the modern Indigenous Oceanic connections of environmental movements. Inspired by Banaban scholar, activist, and poet Teresia Teaiwa's notion of the polygenesis of Pacific literatures, course texts are drawn from oral histories, navigational charts, paintings, photographs, poetry, fiction, personal narratives, film, carvings, tattoo, and regalia. Considering all of these waves of artistic movements in the region, we ask how does navigation, as metaphor and material practice, inform our understandings of historical and contemporary ecological relationships, like climate change and the protection of sacred sites?