Pacific Literatures as World Literature

<p><i>Pacific Literatures as World Literature</i> 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. <p/>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.</p>