Review
Pacific Literature: "Walking Backwards into the Future"
Text : the journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, Vol.29(2), pp.27-31
10/2025
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
Review of the book: Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward, The Rise of Pacific Literature: decolonization, radical campuses, and modernism, Colombia University Press, New York, 2024.
........he has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart (Kasaipwalova, in Long & Hayward, 2024, p. 120)
Kasaipwalova’s words seem fitting as we begin 2025, on the brink of a global trade war, where we’re being pushed into division and disunity when we desperately need to come together to face major global challenges such as climate change. The current atmosphere is strung with threads that trace back to war-torn countries, the culmination of a period of intensified European colonisation and exacerbated competition for resources; and back further still to a time when European powers sought to displace and enslave people to grow their economies and resource stores. This is also part of the Pacific story with the rise of a literary movement that reflects nations trying to shake off colonial systems and logicsto create a distinctly regional literary identity. The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, radical campuses, and modernism performs “ka mua ka muri, walking backward into the future” [1] by taking us back to the teachers, writers, activists and students whose influence carries into the contemporary literature of the Pacific (Long & Hayward, 2024, p. 220); a literature which tells of peoples reckoning with trauma and reinventing themselves following the division of the Pacific by colonial rulers, and the displacement of Pacific Islanders and Indians who were black-birded [2] into indentured slavery on islands far from home. However, Pacific narratives are also “acts of poetic unification” (p. 87), and the emergence of a distinctly regional Pacific literature signalled that “beneath the colonial compartments remain shared roots” (p. 169).
Details
- Title
- Pacific Literature: "Walking Backwards into the Future"
- Creators
- Chantelle Bayes - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- Text : the journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, Vol.29(2), pp.27-31
- Publisher
- Australasian Association of Writing Programs
- Identifiers
- 991013324828802368
- Copyright
- © The Authors.
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Review