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.”
