The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism
Matthew Hayward, "The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism "
English | ISBN: 0231217455 | 2024 | 312 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0231217455 | 2024 | 312 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Winner, 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize
In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the heart of the syllabus. From this local core, students ventured outward to contemporary postcolonial literatures, where they saw modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. Only then did they turn to foundational modernist texts, encountered at last as a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote.
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