What was Pacific Literature?

An Excerpt from the Preface of The Norton Anthology of Pacific Literature,

Rebecca Hogue, PhD, Editor (New York: W.W. Norton, 2025)

To be read in conjunction with The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara for ENL 180, University of California

“While my substitution of the formulation “what was x” may seem perverse, the recent publication of this highly anticipated volume of canonical Pacific literature brings to bear many questions of spatiotemporal scope as well as sequence.  What “attachments,” borrowing from Ilan Stavans’s Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, does Pacific literature have to place, language, and identity?  What has, what does, and what will constitute Pacific literature?  In this groundbreaking collection we examine subaltern literatures of a wide and diverse national, linguistic, and geographic range.  Although anthologies of Pacific writings have been in publication since the 1940s, early anthologies only contained anglophone literatures by European and Euro-American settler colonists, missionaries, and other travel writers such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London.  Inspired by the increase in publication of works of other historically underrepresented minorities and in the post-Civil Rights era, the 1970s delivered an awareness of indigenous histories from the Americas into the Pacific.  The publication of oral histories, myths and legends, and other cultural artifacts such as chants and traditional dances moved from the margins to the mainstream throughout the Pacific.  By the 1980s and 90s, multiculturalist anthologies and the formation of the “local” Asian diasporic community began to infiltrate, and arguably, replace indigenous representations of island cultures.  Upon recognition of this imbalanced approach to representing island cultures, literary critics and historians began toward the turn of the 21st Century to reassessing not only the importance of the subaltern voices of the Pacific, but what spatiotemporal scope must be applied to the region.  Is it, as Arif Dirlik proposed, a Pacific Rim, or perhaps, as the United States Department of Defense has posited, a Transpacific Region?  Or could it be best classified as Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa suggests, Oceania, which he characterizes as a pathway to “each other and everything else”?  While many anthologies organize their sections around modern conceptions of the nation-state, as well as pre- and post-Western contact Pacific Islands, this collection orients geographically around and through the Pacific Ocean and includes literatures in English, Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) and other pidgin dialects, Indigenous literatures in translation from such cultures including but not limited to Hawai’i, Samoa, New Zealand/ Aotearoa, Easter Island/ Rapa Nui, Guam/ Guahan, Yap, Chuuk, Fiji, Australia, Taiwan, and Alaska.”

[...]

“Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), anthologized here, presents an anachronistic view of Micronesia.  Touted for its style in its initial reception, and presented as “literary” unlike other contemporary representations of the Pacific, People nevertheless perpetuated Orientalist depictions of Micronesians while aiming to critique colonialism in the region.  Despite the controversial portrayal of native peoples, Yanagihara’s work remains one of the most widely read novels on the Pacific and thus a seminal example of the legacy of colonialism and challenges of subaltern subjectivity for the region.”