Texts:
Hau’ofa, Epeli. We are the Ocean. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. London: Macmillan, 2010.
Suggested Reading:
Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of the Pacific Islands. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Keown, Michele. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
The South Pacific has been the focus of German, American, British, French and Japanese colonial, economic and strategic ventures. Tahiti girls, tattooed Kanaka warriors, atomic tests in Mururoa, hula dancers, taboo, Pearl Harbour, cannibalism, mutiny on the Bounty, and island nations facing rising sea levels of climate change… the clichés of the South Seas, themselves fragments of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial history, are still potent memes of contemporary Western culture. This course will focus on three very different sites of Polynesian/Western interaction. We will encounter the history of Hawai’i via British exploration, Hawaian kingdom, and US annexation through the poetry of Haunani-Kay Trask’s Night is a Sharkskin Drum (2002) and in extracts from Kaui Hart Hemming’s novel The Descendants (2009), including in our discussion the upcoming movie. We will look next at the historical division of the Samoan islands between (German/New Zealand/Eastern) Samoa, and Western Samoa (still a US colony), considering extracts from Otto Ehler’s Samoa (1894) and contemporary Samoan hiphop. Epeli Hau’ofa’s We are the Ocean (2008) will introduce us to an author whose academic biography (Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga, Australia, Canada) spans the Pacific divide as his art shaped Pacific literatures. Finally, we will move to New Zealand, itself a colonial power in the South Pacific, and the historical site of British/Maori interaction, by considering Keri Hulme’s Booker prize winning novel The Bone People (1984). A reader of Trask, Ehler, and Hart Hemming will be provided; this course will test your knowledge of the texts under discussion in the course of the term. Please familiarize yourself with the history of the South Pacific before the beginning of term.
