Pacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of "becoming oceanic" and suggests a different mode of understanding, viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present, remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty. At the same time, as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and well-being, the Pacific could become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging and care. The Pacific can signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a danger zone of antagonistic peril.
With ground-breaking writings from authors based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and new modes of research - including multispecies ethnography and practice, ecopoetics, and indigenous cosmopolitics - authors explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically grounded range of research themes. This volume aims to decenter continental/land poetics as such via long-standing transnational Pacific ties, re-worlding Pacific literature as world literature.
Ahlberg, Sofia: - Sofia Ahlberg is Vice Dean at the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Beebee, Thomas Oliver: - Thomas O. Beebee is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (1990).
Huang, Hsinya: - Hsinya Huang is a Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. She is the author or editor of books and articles on transnational and transpacific studies, Native American and Pacific Islander literatures, and humanities for the environment, including (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women's Writings (2004), Native North American Literatures: Reflections on Multiculturalism (2009), Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures (2014), Chinese Railroad Workers: Recovery and Representation (2017), Diaspora, Memory and Resurgence: Trans-Pacific Indigenous Writing and Practice (2021), and Radiation Ecologies in Trans-Pacific Indigenous Literature: After Hiroshima (forthcoming). She is former Dean of Arts and Humanities and Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Advancement, NSYSU, and served as Director General of International Cooperation and Science Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.
Lin, Chia-Hua Yvonne: - Chia-hua Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA. She is the recipient of the 2018 Fulbright Graduate Study Grant, the 2020 Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (GSSA) from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, and the 2023 Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers (TOP) Grants from the National Science and Technology Council. She currently serves as the secretary of the Asia Pacific Observatory of Humanities for the Environment (HfE) Global Network.
