Pacific waves: Reverberations from Oceania

It is a truism today to say that the Pacific region of Oceania, surrounded by the world’s 5 largest ocean, tends to disappear in contemporary postcolonial and global discourses, which focus instead on the Pacific Rim nations at its edges. This is the second special issue of a journal published in the UK within the last year (see Kennedy and Wilson 2017; Keown, forthcoming ), featuring new critical perspectives aimed at remedying this absence, which the Tongan intellectual and writer Epeli Hau’ofa images as “the hole in 10 the donut” (2008, 37). This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing emerges from a postgraduate conference convened at the University of Sussex in November 2015. The conference title, which evokes intersecting metaphors of waves and reverberations, is used to signal the forms of current enquiry into the region’s cultural production as one that registers and resists, even as it is shaped by, the political 15 and social forces of decoloni zation and economic neo-liberal globalization. These include the exploitation and marginali zation of indigenous people and resources (Stewart-Harawera 2005, 185): large-scale international migration and dispersal of Pacific Islanders, hybridi zation of identities, refugeeism, climate change, US military and nuclear imperialism, and other traumatic legacies of imperial coloni zation.