Syllabus 2026-27

Please complete the readings prior to your seminar. Readings are available via Talis Aspire (or recommended for purchase as indicated below).

Week 1: Oceanic Storytelling and the ‘Opening’ of the Pacific World.

- Richard Lansdown, "The Noble Savage", in Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006). [Please focus on the short extracts from Louis Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage round the World (1771); Philibert Commerson, “Postscript: On the Island of New Cythera or Tahiti” (1769); James Cook, “Account of His Second Voyage round the World” (1773); and George Forster, A Journey round the World (1777)];

- Patricia O'Brien, "Introduction" and "Nature's Resources and the Forging of Empire", in The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2007);

- Gregory Cushman, "Prologue" (The Legend of Cahuillaca), "Introduction", and "Neo-ecological Imperialism", in Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Week 2: The Island Resource Rush and the South Seas Romance. Herman Melville, Typee (Penguin, 1996 [1846]: recommended for purchaseLink opens in a new window).

Week 3: Planters, Prospectors, Printers. R. L. Stevenson, South Sea Tales (Oxford University Press, 2020 [1893]) [Please read The Beach of Falesá, The Ebb-Tide, "The Bottle Imp" and "Something In It"].

Further reading: Glenda Norquay, "Introduction", Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks, and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s: The Author Incorporated (Anthem Press, 2020).

Week 4: White Contagion. W. Somerset Maugham, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (George H. Doran Company, 1921) [Please read "Rain" and "Mackintosh"]; Jack London, South Sea Tales (Macmillan Company, 1911) [Please read "Mauki", "The Inevitable White Man", and "The Red One"].

Further reading: Quito Swan, "Introduction" in Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, 2022), pp. 12-34; Ponipate Rokolekutu, "Heterogeneity, Race and Genealogical Connection of Spiritual Hinterlands: A Response to Robbie Shilliam's The Black Pacific".

Week 5: Afterlives of the Plantation. Albert Wendt, ‘Inside Us the Dead’ (1976), in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts, ed. by R. Borofski (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020); "Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree" (1974), in Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree and Other Stories (Longman Paul, 1974); and "Prospecting" (1983), in The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man (Viking, 1986); Subramani, "Gamalian’s Woman" and "Sautu", in The Fantasy-Eaters (Three Continents Press, 1988).

Week 7: Decolonization and Pacific Print Cultures. John Kasaipwalova, "Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes", in Kovave Vol. 3, No. 2 (1971), pp. 46-47; Vanessa Griffen, "The Concert", in Mana (Pacific Islands Monthly) Vol. 44, No. 3 (Mar. 1, 1973); Akanisi Sobusobu, "The Taboo", in Mana (Pacific Islands Monthly) Vol 46. No. 5 (May 1, 1975), pp. 46-47.

Further reading: Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward, 'Introduction: Pacific Universities and Modernist Literature", in The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2025); Shital Pravinchandra, "Short Story and Peripheral Production", in The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. by Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 197-210).

Week 8: Development, Tourism, Extractivism. Epeli Hau‘ofa, Tales of the Tikongs (University of Hawai'i Press, 1994 [1983]: recommended for purchase).Link opens in a new window

Further reading: Katerina Teaiwa, "Ruining Pacific Islands: Australia's Phosphate Imperialism", Australian Historical Studies 46. 3 (2015), pp. 374-391; Jini Kim Watson, '"We Want You to Ask Us First': Development, International Aid and the Politics of Indebtedness", in Negotiating Normativity, ed. by Nikita Dhawan, Elisabeth Fink, Johanna Leinius and Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel (Springer, 2016).

Week 9: Militarisation and Nuclear Fallout. Robert Barclay, Meļaļ (University of Hawai'i Press, 2002: recommended for purchaseLink opens in a new window).

Further reading: Teresia Teaiwa, "bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans", The Contemporary Pacific Vol. 6, No. 1 (1994), pp. 87-109.

Week 10: Rising tides and the Oceanic Weird. H. P. Lovecraft, "Dagon" (1917), in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin, 1999); J. G. Ballard, "The Terminal Beach", in The Terminal Beach (Gollancz, 1964); Alexis Wright, "Whale Bone City", from Praiseworthy, in Black Marks on the White Page, ed by Tina Makereti and Witi Ihimaera (Vintage, 2017); Ellen van Neerven, "Water" from Heat and Light (University of Queensland Press, 2014).

Further reading: H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928) in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin, 1999); Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff, '"The One Who Comes from The Sea': Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird" (parts I and II), Humanities 9. 86 (2020).