An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiākea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling.
Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that are not confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moʻolelo kamahaʻo and moʻolelo āiwaiwa, Sāmoan fāgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is what inspires and enables the fantastic to flourish.
As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moʻolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling. In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiʻi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.
Bacchilega, Cristina: - Cristina Bacchilega is professor emerita of English at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies.
Brown, Marie Alohalani: - Marie Alohalani Brown is professor, specialist in Hawaiian religion, at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Grace, Patricia: - Patricia Grace is the first Maori woman to publish a collection of short stories (1975). Since then she has published three other short story collections, three award-winning novels, and several children's books. Her novel Dogside Story (UH Press edition, 2002) won the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction. She is widely anthologized and translated into more than eight languages, and is considered not only one of the finest writers in New Zealand and the Pacific, but one of the most important writers of the post-colonial novel in English in the world today.
Ho'omanawanui: - kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi professor of Hawaiian literature at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she specializes in Hawaiian and Pacific literatures and Indigenous place-based perspectives.
Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy: - Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is Climate Envoy for the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the director of Jo-Jikum, an environmental nonprofit.
Kahukiwa, Robyn: - Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand's most important Māori artists. Her paintings have been exhibited worldwide and are held in galleries, museums and private collections. Robyn has written and illustrated numerous children's picture books and has herself been the subject of books including The Art of Robyn Kahukiwa (Reed, 2005).
Kihleng, Emelihter: - Emelihter Kihleng is a poet and author. She has held academic and other professional positions in Pohnpei, Guam, Hawai'i, and New Zealand, and is a curatorial research fellow at the MARKK, Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg, Germany.
Kneubuhl, Victoria Nalani: - Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl is an award-winning Hawaiʻi playwright and author. Her many plays have been performed in Hawaiʻi, the continental United States, Britain, Asia, and the Pacific. She has written and produced several novels, television series, and documentaries.
Kuwada, Bryan Kamaoli: - Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada is a writer, poet, and photographer. An assistant professor at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, he uses Hawaiian traditional knowledge and stories to navigate and imagine Hawaiian futures.
McMullin, Dan Taulapapa: -
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa Amelika (American Samoa). His book of poems Coconut Milk (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year.
Taulapapa's artwork has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Oakland Museum, Bishop Museum, NYU's /A/P/A Gallery, and the United Nations. His performance poem The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. His film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award.
His film 100 Tikis is an art appropriation video at the intersection of tiki kitsch and indigenous sovereignty, and was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone First Peoples Festival in Montreal; and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti International Oceania Documentary Film Festival and at Pacifique Festival in Rochefort, France. His art studio and writing practice is based in Hudson, New York, where he lives with his partner Stephen. Taulapapa is currently working on a novel. His work can be viewed at www.taulapapa.com.
Perez, Craig Santos: - Craig Santos Perez, 2023 winner of the National Book Award for poetry, is a Chamoru author and editor from Guam. He was most recently professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Thomas, Nicholas: - Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific (2020). He co-curated the major 2018 exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, with Peter Brunt.
Warren, Joyce Pualani: - Joyce Pualani Warren is a diasporic Black Kanaka Maoli and assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa, where she teaches Hawaiian and Pacific literatures.
Wendt, Albert: -
ʻO le atamai o aliʻi, le Susuga Maualaʻivao Albert Wendt ʻo se tusitala lāuiloa i le Pasefika ma ʻo se polofesa ʻua lītaea mai le Iunivesitē o 'Aukilani, Niu Sila.
Maualaivao Albert Wendt is the Pacific's most renowned writer. He is an emeritus professor at Auckland University.
