The interplay of the local and the global in Witi Ihimaera's revisions

This article considers Witi Ihimaera’s reputation as a pioneer of Maori literature in order to analyse the way he negotiates global and local influences on his writing in the light of the claims of posterity and the obligation to the past. It examines Ihimaera’s changing attitude in his rewriting of his earliest novels, Tangi and Whanau, in The Rope of Man and Whanau II, focusing on the trope of the trauma by which Ihimaera conceptualizes the impact of colonialism on Maori communities and on his writing, and its counterpart, the image of the rope of man, which he develops in order to indicate a path from conflict to reconciliation. Noting that Ihimaera risks a seemingly uncritical celebration of globalization in his rewritings, I propose to read them with reference to a local Maori tradition, emblematized by the meeting house, Rongopai, providing a model of transformative imagination that enables readers to envisage a locally shared world.postprin

Breathing space: ecology and sovereignty in Pacific Island poetry

Paper Session XIIIThis paper will discuss the ways in which the image of breath serves to concretize ideas and attitudes toward ecology and sovereignty in Pacific Island poetry. It will be based on the recognition of the importance of the oceanic environment to the cultures and societies of the Island Pacific, of connectedness as a defining characteristic of island life, and of the irreplaceable value of islands as places. One implication of this recognition is that the pursuit of sovereignty and development is inseparable from respect for ecology and sustainability. Perceptions and interpretations of the ocean as a connecting element have often been framed in terms of fluidity and mobility suggested by a metaphorical association between the ocean and blood that encompasses genealogical histories of migration and settlement. In my paper, I will try to suggest the advantage of framing such perceptions and interpretations in terms of a metaphorical association between the ocean and breath, drawing attention to the connection between the oceans and the lifesustaining terrestrial Atmosphere as well as the existence of islands as habitable places threatened by rising sea levels. I will indicate the importance accorded to breath and breathing in indigenous epistemologies, emphasizing the value of centered relationships and an acknowledgment of the presence and precedence of others within and beyond the horizon of visibility, and discuss the metaphorical significance of breath in conceptualizations of space, the negotiation of boundaries and cross-cultural (institutional) action with reference to poems by Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Robert Sullivan, Teweiariki Teaero and Teresia Teaiwa.published_or_final_versionThe Oceanic Conference on Creativity and Climate Change: Oceans, Islands & Skies, Suva, Fiji, 13-17 September 2010. In Dreadlocks, 2012, v. 6/7, p. 147-17

Allegories of Awakening: Melancholy, repetition and "race" in Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars

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From Unincorporated Territory: Craig Santos Perez's resiting of postcoloniality in America's Pacific Century

In this paper I will aim to show how Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing project From Unincorporated Territory—a project that fits Marjorie Perloff’s characterization, in Unoriginal Genius, of a public-oriented experimental poetics as “poetry by other means”—contests and resituates Guam’s condition as the oldest Western colony in the Pacific in the context of twenty-first-century postcoloniality. If the twentieth century was an era of decolonization, what Michael Lujan Bevacqua refers to as Guam’s “banal coloniality” today (its militarization as natural and near …postprin

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.postprin

Literary citizenship in the writing of Oceania: The example of Samoan literature

In this paper, I am interested in the emergence and articulation of new visions and practices of citizenship as politicized ways of belonging in transnational and globalized contexts, in which the nation or nation state as empowering framework has come to be widely challenged. As I will try to argue, the development such visions and practices calls for an imaginative rethinking of national identity and as such has much to learn from postcolonial situations where the institutions of the Western-style nation state sit uncomfortably on top of (or beside) social formations shaped by long histories of prior occupation and settlement. While such arrangements do not in themselves make for political innovation, they provide imaginative resources for writers whose lives and work chart and explore challenging ways of inhabiting and sharing globalized nation spaces.postprin

Hu(l)man Medi(t)ations: Intercultural explorations in Keri Hulme’s The Windeater / Te Kaihau

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Involving People in School Facility Planning

A Kansas school district involves the community in the planning of a facilities study. The district found that community involvement is a valuable asset

Dynamics of the Pionium with the Density Matrix Formalism

The evolution of pionium, the $\pi^+ \pi^-$ hydrogen-like atom, while passing through matter is solved within the density matrix formalism in the first Born approximation. We compare the influence on the pionium break-up probability between the standard probabilistic calculations and the more precise picture of the density matrix formalism accounting for interference effects. We focus our general result in the particular conditions of the DIRAC experiment at CERN.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, submitted to J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Phy

Samoan Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History

Hailed as "the spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre" (Balme, 2007: 194), John Kneubuhl is best known as a playwright and a Hollywood scriptwriter. Less well known is that after his return to Samoa in 1968 he also devoted much of his time to the study and teaching of Polynesian culture and history. The sense of personal and cultural loss, which his plays often dramatise in stories of spirit possession, also guided his investment in oral history, in the form of extended series of radio talks and public lectures, as well as long life history interviews. Based on archival recordings of this oral history, this article considers Kneubuhl's sense of history and how it informs his most autobiographical play, Think of a Garden (1992)