New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernity in the Pacific

Abstract

In the final essay (or coda) of Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long’s collection of essays New Oceania: Modernism and Modernities in the Pacific, scholar Susan Standford Friedman aptly summarises the volume as an exposure of the “prevailing metropolitan and continentalist assumptions about modernity” in the Pacific (245). Such assumptions are concerned with the so-called infancy of Pacific writing in comparison with older print and publishing traditions from the global north. In this volume, modernist, literary and Pacific studies are used to prise open this seeming binary, and to sketch understandings of modernism and modernity from Oceanian writers across the region. Excitingly, the volume offers extension to this assumed dialectic via various critical and disciplinary gazes from its contributors.