EN2ZK/EN3ZK Sea of Stories: Writing the Pacific World

The islands of the Pacific Ocean have been imagined as exotic fantasy spaces for European imperial adventure, their white beaches and lush forests populated by pirates, cannibals and castaways. In literature, fantasies of Pacific paradise date back to the romantic visions of Tahiti that captivated Europeans in the eighteenth century, as well as the popular Robinsonades and South Seas Romances that followed in their wake. This module investigates how writers in and from the region have worked against these narratives by telling alternative stories about the waves of colonial capitalism, environmental crisis and resistance that swept the modern Pacific World.

From Oceanic storytelling to the South Seas tales of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Somerset Maugham, through to post-independence writing by Albert Wendt, John Kasaipwalova and Epeli Hau‘ofa, among others, we ask how writers in the Pacific have responded to the upheavals of island indenture and the plantation system as well as their afterlives in contemporary extractivism, nuclear testing, tourism, and rising sea levels. While we approach literature as a privileged medium for registering island history as it is lived and experienced, we also maintain a critical focus on the question of who is able to tell – or write – stories about the Pacific. How, this module asks, do small islands become exemplary sites for reading world-history? And how has this history shaped the ‘sea of stories’, in turn, by influencing what is written, published, and made available to us as readers?