New Oceania

Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific

Matthew Hayward, Maebh Long, Matthew Hayward, Maebh Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000576610
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1 ‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies

Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward

In 1987, Raymond Williams challenged the received understanding of modernism, arguing that it presents a ‘highly selected version of the modern which then offers to appropriate the whole of modernity’.¹ Although the counter-examples he chooses are European, Williams’s call for an ‘alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century’ has been adopted repeatedly in the decades since, and the new modernist studies have arrived under a range of possible titles—geomodernisms, alternative modernities, new world modernisms, transnational modernisms, weak modernisms, bad modernisms, vernacular modernisms, global modernisms.² The emphases are different for each formulation, and few perhaps have managed fully to rid themselves of associations with the experimental styles and technological advancements of early-twentieth-century Europe and North America. Collectively, however, these reframings have amply demonstrated that Global South modernisms, previously rejected as ‘epistemologically impossible’, ‘lamentable mimicry’, or the ‘contamination of a more genuine local culture’, in fact present conceptually viable and aesthetically rich modernist traditions.³ Modernist studies now encompass a range of possible modernisms, operating in interconnected yet distinct ways, at different times, in different places.

1Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’ New Left Review 1, no. 175 (1989): 49–50.

2See Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48.

3Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World’, New German Critique no. 100 (2007): 198.

And yet, in this major reorientation of modernist studies, Oceania has remained all but absent from the new critical maps. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s collection Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity (2005) lays vital stress on the variety of modernisms and their integrated yet specific contexts: ‘which modernism, written when and why and from what place—which city, which hillside, which seat on the train, which new nation or new colony, and before, after or during which war’ (emphasis in original here and throughout volume).⁴ However, the modernisms and contexts of Oceania are nowhere to be found: Apia, Mauna Kea, sugarcane trains, the Solomon Islands, and the Bougainville Civil War fail to appear. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (2005) identifies modernisms in India, Africa, Latin America, and China, but Oceania is seen to play no part in their transnational exchanges.⁵ The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010) ventures into the Pacific, but engages only with antipodean settler modernisms in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.⁶ Mark Wollaeger’s 700-page collection, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), affords no more than passing reference to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, while wholly ignoring the creative output of the Pacific Islands.⁷ None of the Cambridge companions to modernism include discussions of Indigenous art and literature from Oceania, and David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar’s Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) mentions the Pacific only as a place to which Zora Neale Hurston did not travel.⁸

4Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, ‘Introduction: The Global Horizon of Modernism’, in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1.

5Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

6Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

7Mark Wollaeger, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

8David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 380.

Although none of these volumes claim to present the entirety of global modernist output, the repeated elision of Oceanian literature, art, music, dance, and theatre serves to present the Pacific as a space devoid of creative responses to modernity. Not only does the omission ignore the rich cultural production of a sizeable quarter of the globe, it further entrenches the colonial characterisation of the Pacific Islands as the very antithesis of modernity—‘thousands of miles from civilization’, as W. Somerset Maugham put it, and peopled by ‘creatures of a more primitive nature’;⁹ or ‘centuries and centuries behind us’, as D. H. Lawrence’s opines, ‘in the life-struggle, the consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the soul into fullness’.¹⁰ Uncalculated as current scholarly exclusions may be, they cannot but reinforce the sense that Global North concepts of modernism and modernity demand an unmodern Other, with the cultures and productions of the Pacific remaining fixed in the very binaries that the new modernist studies seeks to undermine. Repudiating this critical misrepresentation, New Oceania presents a set of chapters that, individually and collectively, recognise the claims to modernity performed in a range of contemporary Pacific texts and art works.

9W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919; New York: Dover, 2006), 145; The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921; New York: Mondial, 2008), 72.

10D. H. Lawrence, ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Michael Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 118.

The volume does so by placing modernist studies and Pacific studies in conversation. Pacific studies covers a vast and complex region, working, as Teresia Teaiwa puts it, to ‘honor and respect the layered, oceanic histories of peoples whose descendants today are some of the world’s most misunderstood and misrepresented groups’.¹¹ As an academic discipline, Pacific studies emerged in part from the American interest in area studies in the 1950s, and early incarnations in Hawai‘i, Australia, and New Zealand positioned the Pacific and its peoples as objects of study rather than active participants.¹² Pacific scholars have worked hard to wrest back the discourse in the decades since, creating a suitably broad field that is generally more ‘island-centred’ and indigenised. Pacific scholarship has served different functions at different times, working towards preservation, growth, and cultural renaissance, but understanding the relationship between tradition and modernity—including the traditional in the modern, and the modernity in tradition—has remained central.¹³ Broadly speaking, Pacific studies calls for academic vocabularies, methodologies, and protocols that do not obscure or distort Pacific lives; that understand Pacific knowledges to be integral, dynamic, and responsive to local and global conditions; and that seek to strengthen links between the community and the academic world. For many Oceanian students, in universities inside or outside the region, a Pacific studies course can feel like the first time an academic discipline speaks their languages and comprehends their protocols and etiquette.¹⁴

11Teresia K. Teaiwa, ‘Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters: Evidence of Teaching and Learning’, The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 266.

12Terence Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies’, Pacific Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 115–37.

13Stewart Firth, ‘Future Directions for Pacific Studies’, The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003): 139–48.

14See, for example, Konai Helu Thaman, ‘Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education’, The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003): 1–17; Graeme Whimp, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes’, The Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 2 (2008): 397–421; Terence Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On’, The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 153–69; Teaiwa, ‘Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters’.

To those familiar with modernism as the writings of an avant-garde European and North American elite, a conversation between modernist and Pacific studies might seem destined to be a monologue that once again reduces Oceania to a backdrop for Western adventure, a muse for European art, or a belated imitator of Northern Hemisphere literature. Developments within modernist studies, however, have loosened the modernist rubric from its strict associations with Europe, or the early twentieth century, or rejections of conventional realism—that is, from a specific region, period, and style—and repurposed it as a frame through which engagements with specific experiences of modernity can be studied, the transnational connections between different nations and groups understood, and the material specificities from which cultural productions arise explored. Interested in rupture, retention, and change, and interpolation and indigenisation, modernist studies presents another way of reading the aesthetic and political, local and transnational, traditional and transitional elements of Oceanian texts.

Of course, modernist studies is not an Indigenous discipline, and however well-intentioned its global aspirations, it remains implicated in the colonial legacies Pacific studies has worked so hard to contest. Yet, as Graeme Whimp and Terence Wesley-Smith suggest, Pacific studies already exists ‘in the vā, “the space between, the separation that connects”, navigating choppy waters between rationales, disciplines, knowledges, identities, lands, peoples, and cultures’.¹⁵ This interdisciplinarity and adaptability is a strength, and Pacific studies knows how to draw on and indigenise discourses not native to Oceania if and when they are useful—as Steven Edmund Winduo puts it, ‘maintain[ing] cultural independence’ by ‘incorporat[ing] and adapt[ing] other cultural practices’.¹⁶ Conversely, Pacific studies has much to offer modernist studies, not just in continuing to undermine the colonial foundations of the discipline, but in its nuanced understanding of the ways in which modernity is enacted and experienced across a vast and varied region.

15Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On’, 164.

16Steven Edmund Winduo, ‘Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars Within a Folk Narrative Space’, New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2010): 602.

In ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’, Teaiwa refers to Sir Tom Davis, an Indigenous Cook Islander of Rarotongan and European descent. In addition to his achievements as Prime Minister and one of the region’s first novelists, Davis was involved in revitalising ocean canoes and traditional navigation in the Cook Islands, but felt few compulsions to adhere to strictly ‘authentic’ methods. When the building and maintenance of wooden canoes proved difficult, he switched materials, saying: ‘If my ancestors had fiberglass they would have used it’.¹⁷ The chapters of New Oceania experiment with the innovations of the new modernist studies to see if it can yield materials that are workable for Pacific studies. The collection as a whole presents modernism as a dynamic mode, which plays out in distinct ways across the region, while remaining a broadly common and therefore comparable aesthetic process. Some chapters speak directly of an Oceanian or Oceanic modernism, some see the value of further specificity—Māori modernism, ‘Coolie’ modernism—while others retain a separation between the cultural products of Oceania and other modernisms, but all explore what happens when Pacific studies and modernist studies sail in the same waters.

17Tom Davis, as quoted by Teresia Teaiwa, ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’, in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 44–45.

Of course, these waters are often challenging to navigate. If we characterise this cultural production as a modernism, do we recognise—and therefore legitimise—alternative modes of modernity, thereby supporting the ongoing political activism in the region, for Indigenous sovereignty in some parts, and against competing neocolonial interests in others? Or do we repeat colonial and neocolonial manoeuvres, overwriting alternative discourses with a single, authorised, and totalising framework? Does this intermingling open up new routes for Pacific scholars to explore the complex transnational negotiations at work in modern Oceanian cultural production, or does it signal new inlets for a neoliberal and globalising process of cultural appropriation? How deep is the modernist studies commitment to reorientation? Is it merely an inclusionist gesture, institutionalising and incorporating yet another cultural Other, without allowing its fundamental differences to challenge the legitimacy of the dominant model? Or can more expansive and flexible conceptions of modernity and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• A Note on Language and Spelling
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies
• 2 ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania
• 3 ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance
• 4 No Ordinary Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’s First Book of Verse
• 5 ‘Our Own Identity’: Albert Wendt, James Joyce, and the Indigenisation of Influence
• 6 Mapping Modernity in Guam: The Unincorporated Ecologies of Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics
• 7 Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Soaba’s Wanpis, and Oceanian Literary Modernism
• 8 Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine
• 9 ‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’: Te Ao Hou
• 10 Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre: Nina Nawalowalo and The Conch
• 11 Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’
• 12 Oceanian Knowing and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove
• 13 On Memory and Modernity: Sudesh Mishra’s Oceania
• 14 Oceania, the Planetary, and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda
• Index