Books by Maebh Long
In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific I... more In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the heart of the syllabus. From this local core, students ventured outward to contemporary postcolonial literatures, where they saw modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. Only then did they turn to foundational modernist texts, encountered at last as a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote.
The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.
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Applications are invited from suitably qualified graduates for a fully funded three-year PhD, fun... more Applications are invited from suitably qualified graduates for a fully funded three-year PhD, funded through the Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund and held at the English Programme at the University of Waikato. The project, entitled ‘Modern Immunity: Modernism, Threat and Immune Poetics’, offers an exciting opportunity for a student to study modernist discourses of immunity.
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For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands ha... more For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist studies’ critical map. Yet, as the chapters of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific collectively show, Pacific artists and writers have been as creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity as any of their global counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century, driving a still ongoing process of decolonisation, Pacific Islanders forged an extraordinary cultural and artistic movement. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of other influences — realist novels, avant-garde poetry, anti-colonial discourse, biblical verse, Indian mythology, American television, Bollywood film — Pacific artists developed new creative registers to express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities. New Oceania presents the first sustained account of the modernist dimensions of this period, while presenting timely reflections on the ideological and methodological limitations of the global modernism rubric. Breaking new critical ground, it brings together scholars from a range of backgrounds to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars, and the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars.
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An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of twentieth century... more An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of twentieth century, the Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien presents an intimate look into the life and thought of Brian O’Nolan, a prolific author of novels, stories, sketches, and journalism who famously wrote and presented works to the reading public under a variety of pseudonyms. Spanning the years 1934 to 1966, these compulsively readable letters show us O’Nolan, or O’Brien, or Myles Na gCopaleen, at his most cantankerous and most intimate.
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Journal Articles by Maebh Long
Social History of Medicine, 2024
From 1890, as advertising in Irish newspapers grew in quantity and sophistication, a discourse of... more From 1890, as advertising in Irish newspapers grew in quantity and sophistication, a discourse of immunity began to circulate. Advertisers drew on advancements in bacteriology and immunology to present their goods as defensive strategies against a range of threats, from major infectious diseases to everyday coughs and colds. Consumers were urged to supplement their bodies’ vulnerabilities by purchasing pills and tonics, with medical products joined by immunity-assuring underwear, coats, cosmetics and cars. From a dataset of every immunity-focused advertisement in the Irish Newspaper Archives and The Irish Times archives between 1890 and 1940, I unpack the ways immunity was presented to the Irish public outside of medical institutions. I show how discourses of immunity intersected with influenza outbreaks, consider the implication of the non-national origins of many advertisements, and trace their rhetoric of protection and resistance across a range of product types.
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Feminist Modernist Studies, 2024
Jean Rhys’s corpus is known for its continual rewriting and revisiting, yet scholarship on Rhys’s... more Jean Rhys’s corpus is known for its continual rewriting and revisiting, yet scholarship on Rhys’s reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has concentrated on its extensive treatment in Wide Sargasso Sea. When traces of Brontë are found in Rhys’s earlier works, they are most commonly understood as foreshadowings of Rhys’s final novel, a position that figures Rhys’s corpus as a practice of practising, whose potential is finally realized late in Rhys’s life and career. This article, instead, emphasizes Rhys’s sustained creative practice of rewriting, presenting her engagement with Brontë not in linear or developmental terms, but as a long-standing critical fascination worked out and through all of her novels. Traces of Bertha’s distress, Rochester’s control, and rooms that restrict and depress recur across Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). We show that Brontë’s novel was a major influence on the settings, characterizations, and preoccupations across Rhys’s earlier novels, arguing that Jane Eyre is a fundamental part of Rhys’s imaginary and Bertha is an inextricable aspect of Rhys’s protagonists.
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Irish Studies Review, 2023
During the 1950s and 1960s influenza was a recurring theme in the Cruiskeen Lawn, a satirical col... more During the 1950s and 1960s influenza was a recurring theme in the Cruiskeen Lawn, a satirical column by Myles na Copaleen (Flann O’Brien) in The Irish Times. The columns’ engagement arose from Ireland’s experience of brutal influenza seasons and, in particular, the 1957–58 pandemic, known at the time as the Asian Flu. The pandemic’s virus killed approximately over a million people worldwide, but until our recent, COVID-inspired interest in historical outbreaks, has received very limited critical engagement. In this article I take Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive as a case study through which to explore literary studies’ amnesia regarding medical history, specifically the 1957–58 pandemic, subsequent influenza outbreaks, and associated bacterial complications. Weaving together O’Brien’s correspondence, journalism and final completed novel, I propose a new way of understanding The Dalkey Archive, one that deprioritises its connections to politics and presents it instead as a response to the symptoms and strains of pandemics and outbreaks.
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Medical Humanities , 2022
In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 were found in Aotearoa New Zealand, the government moved to e... more In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 were found in Aotearoa New Zealand, the government moved to eliminate community transmission of the virus through self-isolation. During this month, as the population discussed if, when and how households would be asked to stay at home, terms such as lockdown—the state of (national) closure—and bubble—the household isolating together—became common parts of everyday conversation.
In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the terms lockdown and bubble as they were used in tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19NZ. Both lockdown and bubble are metaphors of containment that provided different ways of understanding and engaging with government stay-at-home measures by highlighting and minimising different aspects of the event. We found that while the strong, prison connotations of lockdown were reflected in discussions of the measure as a tough form of control exercised from above, the lighter associations of the term bubble led to the perception of this measure as more malleable and conducive to exertion of individual control. Yet, although the seemingly restrictive range of lockdown made it a useful term for the expression of negative affect, the term was actually more frequently used with neutral or unclear affect to share information. Conversely, while bubble tweets expressed more positive sentiment, humour and support towards government stay-at-home measures, this rendered the term surprisingly restrictive in its potential uses: its lightness makes it an effective way to limit the expression of antilockdown sentiment. As Kiwi Twitter users faced the uncertainty of the first COVID-19 lockdown, the pre-existing connotations of the metaphors used to frame stay-at-home measures also helped frame their own experiences of these measures.
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Modernism/modernity, 28.2, 2021
For so long figured in European discourses as the very antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islan... more For so long figured in European discourses as the very antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist map. Yet as “Towards an Oceanian Modernism” shows, Pacific artists and writers have been actively engaged in the construction and representation of their modernity. Closely aligned to the newly gained political independence of many Pacific Islands nations, and involved with Indigenous rights movements in others, Pacific writers rejected the old adventure-yarn clichés of tropical paradises and cannibal isles, and worked to forge a literature of Oceania—not as a testing ground for Western desires and anxieties, but as a modern home and a place requiring its own creative self-reflection and refashioning. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of influences—from Victorian literary realism to Hollywood film, African modernisms to Indian mythology—Oceanian writers forged new modes that express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities.
Tracing the acts of adaptation, indigenization and appropriation that characterize this literature, “Towards an Oceanian Modernism” in the first place challenges the exclusion of a sizeable quarter of the globe from the new modernist studies. Despite the radical revisions to modernist borders in recent decades, the persistent critical blindness to Indigenous modernisms suggests that the discipline is still haunted by hierarchies of origins and derivations—hierarchies that Oceanian literature from an early stage sought to undermine. However, the article also reflects upon what is at stake in bringing the global modernist rubric to bear on Oceania. Acknowledging the power imbalance of contemporary scholarly discourse, it resolves upon a modernist mapping of transnational thought and movement that works no longer in terms of the stability and power of continents, but, most appropriately for the Pacific, in terms of archipelagos—a sea of islands in which modernisms and modernities relate to each other in multiple, shifting ways.
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The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies, 2020
This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Br... more This article brings Friedrich Kittler’s media determinism to bear on a selection of works from Brian O’Nolan’s oeuvre. It briefly examines Myles na gCopaleen’s play with posthuman hybrids in Cruiskeen Lawn, seeing his vignettes as extravagant, humorous depictions of the ways our bodies and symbolic order are determined by the mechanical. It then maps the movement between
typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.
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Modernist Cultures, 2020
This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subram... more This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subramani revised and reworked modernist texts in their construction of a local postcolonial literature. These writers were schooled in a colonial education system that was, by the 1950s and 60s, in ideological disarray, as the jingoistic, imperial texts of the English syllabus began to give way to the crisis and self-interrogation of literary modernism. The students who graduated from these classes went on to create a first wave of Fijian creative writing in English. As this article shows, Griffen, Manoa, and Subramani carried into their writing fragments and forms of the texts they had been required to learn by rote, and they refashioned these into new wholes. In their short stories and poems of the late 1960s and early 70s, these writers turned the literature of past imperial breakdown towards present and future needs, adapting fragmentary, perspectival and multivocal texts towards a postcolonial independence still riven by colonially introduced problems. Ultimately, we argue, the creation of this new literature denotes the failure of the education system to impress British superiority upon its colonial subjects, and the success of the subaltern in reclaiming the means of expression.
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New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific, 2019
Colonised and coerced from the late 1700s, the peoples of Oceania enacted an extraordinary cultur... more Colonised and coerced from the late 1700s, the peoples of Oceania enacted an extraordinary cultural and artistic renaissance in the second half of the twentieth century. This rebirth was closely entwined with newly won political independence in many Pacific Island nations, and was an integral part of the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights in others. Galvanised by rapid developments in education, technology, transport, communication, and print, Pacific Islanders across the region fashioned national and regional artistic movements that examined the modernity that they were simultaneously bringing into existence. Exploring questions of resistance, language, tradition, and change, Oceanian writers and artists worked with and toward the new: new national identities, new regional identities, and new ways of articulating these lived experiences.
This opening chapter lays the groundwork for those that follow, as it reflects on what is at stake in bringing Pacific studies and modernist studies into conjunction. It presents the rise of an anglophone literary movement in Oceania within the context of this conversation, figuring it in terms of the local and transnational forces propelling and preventing a Pacific-driven modernity. Outlining the relationship between the major works and the far greater number of smaller pieces published in the literary periodicals that flourished between 1960 and 1990, this chapter identifies the textual and infrastructural networks that gave Pacific writers a sense of connectedness. Following this historical positioning of Pacific creativity, it outlines the ways in which the contributors’ chapters read Pacific creativity in tandem with modernist preoccupations, mapping the connections between the questions, insights, and nuances that they offer.
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Modernist Cultures , 2020
This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subram... more This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subramani revised and reworked modernist texts in their construction of a local postcolonial literature. These writers were schooled in a colonial education system that was, by the 1950s and 60s, in ideological disarray, as the jingoistic, imperial texts of the English syllabus began to give way to the crisis and self-interrogation of literary modernism. The students who graduated from these classes went on to create a first wave of Fijian creative writing in English. As this article shows, Griffen, Manoa, and Subramani carried into their writing fragments and forms of the texts they had been required to learn by rote, and they refashioned these into new wholes. In their short stories and poems of the late 1960s and early 70s, these writers turned the literature of past imperial breakdown towards present and future needs, adapting fragmentary, perspectival and multivocal texts towards a postcolonial independence still riven by colonially introduced problems. Ultimately, we argue, the creation of this new literature denotes the failure of the education system to impress British superiority upon its colonial subjects, and the success of the subaltern in reclaiming the means of expression.
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Pacific Dynamics, 2018
The centenary of indenture in Fiji was celebrated with public displays, speeches, parades, and pu... more The centenary of indenture in Fiji was celebrated with public displays, speeches, parades, and publications. The momentum for critical and creative response grew in tandem with the wave of publications inspired by the end of colonial rule in many Pacific Island countries. This period of increased agency and autonomy was also a time of political uncertainty in Fiji, as questions of the nation's identity and direction were raised. For many Indo-Fijian writers rootedness in Fiji was voiced through the traumas of indenture, which they invested with mythic valence, and which can be understood as operating as an origin story for Indo-Fijians. Vijay Mishra considered indenture, or girmit, to be a foundational ideology for Indo-Fijian writers, but viewing girmit in terms of false consciousness leads him to read Indo-Fijian anxieties in terms of political blindness and cultural insularity. Building instead on Sudesh Mishra's elaboration of girmit as non-agreement, and Vijay Mishra's later revisions of girmit ideology as founded on memories of betrayal, this article argues that girmit can be productively understood through Marianne Hirsh's work on postmemory. Looking at writings of the centenary, and in particular Subramani's short stories, this article proposes that the traumas of girmit that haunt writings of the period do so as postmemories.
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Symploke, 2018
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symploke, 2018
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Kevin Barry’s novel, City of Bohane, presents the west coast of Ireland gripped in the hyper-viol... more Kevin Barry’s novel, City of Bohane, presents the west coast of Ireland gripped in the hyper-violence of a dystopian urban future. This article argues that the novel’s power structures, seemingly redolent of unrepentant brutality, epitomise an excessive melancholy; a failure of mourning that causes the city
and its inhabitants to stagnate in aggressive, nostalgic desire. Relations to the past, to the self, the desired other and power in City of Bohane are inextricable from discourses of melancholic loss, lack, identification, gender, violence and the fetish, and by reading Barry’s work through Freud’s, Agamben’s, Žižek’s and Butler’s theorisations of the melancholy, we explore the tensions between desire, loss and black bile.
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Books by Maebh Long
The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.
Journal Articles by Maebh Long
In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the terms lockdown and bubble as they were used in tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19NZ. Both lockdown and bubble are metaphors of containment that provided different ways of understanding and engaging with government stay-at-home measures by highlighting and minimising different aspects of the event. We found that while the strong, prison connotations of lockdown were reflected in discussions of the measure as a tough form of control exercised from above, the lighter associations of the term bubble led to the perception of this measure as more malleable and conducive to exertion of individual control. Yet, although the seemingly restrictive range of lockdown made it a useful term for the expression of negative affect, the term was actually more frequently used with neutral or unclear affect to share information. Conversely, while bubble tweets expressed more positive sentiment, humour and support towards government stay-at-home measures, this rendered the term surprisingly restrictive in its potential uses: its lightness makes it an effective way to limit the expression of antilockdown sentiment. As Kiwi Twitter users faced the uncertainty of the first COVID-19 lockdown, the pre-existing connotations of the metaphors used to frame stay-at-home measures also helped frame their own experiences of these measures.
Tracing the acts of adaptation, indigenization and appropriation that characterize this literature, “Towards an Oceanian Modernism” in the first place challenges the exclusion of a sizeable quarter of the globe from the new modernist studies. Despite the radical revisions to modernist borders in recent decades, the persistent critical blindness to Indigenous modernisms suggests that the discipline is still haunted by hierarchies of origins and derivations—hierarchies that Oceanian literature from an early stage sought to undermine. However, the article also reflects upon what is at stake in bringing the global modernist rubric to bear on Oceania. Acknowledging the power imbalance of contemporary scholarly discourse, it resolves upon a modernist mapping of transnational thought and movement that works no longer in terms of the stability and power of continents, but, most appropriately for the Pacific, in terms of archipelagos—a sea of islands in which modernisms and modernities relate to each other in multiple, shifting ways.
typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.
This opening chapter lays the groundwork for those that follow, as it reflects on what is at stake in bringing Pacific studies and modernist studies into conjunction. It presents the rise of an anglophone literary movement in Oceania within the context of this conversation, figuring it in terms of the local and transnational forces propelling and preventing a Pacific-driven modernity. Outlining the relationship between the major works and the far greater number of smaller pieces published in the literary periodicals that flourished between 1960 and 1990, this chapter identifies the textual and infrastructural networks that gave Pacific writers a sense of connectedness. Following this historical positioning of Pacific creativity, it outlines the ways in which the contributors’ chapters read Pacific creativity in tandem with modernist preoccupations, mapping the connections between the questions, insights, and nuances that they offer.
and its inhabitants to stagnate in aggressive, nostalgic desire. Relations to the past, to the self, the desired other and power in City of Bohane are inextricable from discourses of melancholic loss, lack, identification, gender, violence and the fetish, and by reading Barry’s work through Freud’s, Agamben’s, Žižek’s and Butler’s theorisations of the melancholy, we explore the tensions between desire, loss and black bile.
The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.
In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the terms lockdown and bubble as they were used in tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19NZ. Both lockdown and bubble are metaphors of containment that provided different ways of understanding and engaging with government stay-at-home measures by highlighting and minimising different aspects of the event. We found that while the strong, prison connotations of lockdown were reflected in discussions of the measure as a tough form of control exercised from above, the lighter associations of the term bubble led to the perception of this measure as more malleable and conducive to exertion of individual control. Yet, although the seemingly restrictive range of lockdown made it a useful term for the expression of negative affect, the term was actually more frequently used with neutral or unclear affect to share information. Conversely, while bubble tweets expressed more positive sentiment, humour and support towards government stay-at-home measures, this rendered the term surprisingly restrictive in its potential uses: its lightness makes it an effective way to limit the expression of antilockdown sentiment. As Kiwi Twitter users faced the uncertainty of the first COVID-19 lockdown, the pre-existing connotations of the metaphors used to frame stay-at-home measures also helped frame their own experiences of these measures.
Tracing the acts of adaptation, indigenization and appropriation that characterize this literature, “Towards an Oceanian Modernism” in the first place challenges the exclusion of a sizeable quarter of the globe from the new modernist studies. Despite the radical revisions to modernist borders in recent decades, the persistent critical blindness to Indigenous modernisms suggests that the discipline is still haunted by hierarchies of origins and derivations—hierarchies that Oceanian literature from an early stage sought to undermine. However, the article also reflects upon what is at stake in bringing the global modernist rubric to bear on Oceania. Acknowledging the power imbalance of contemporary scholarly discourse, it resolves upon a modernist mapping of transnational thought and movement that works no longer in terms of the stability and power of continents, but, most appropriately for the Pacific, in terms of archipelagos—a sea of islands in which modernisms and modernities relate to each other in multiple, shifting ways.
typed and handwritten texts in At Swim-Two-Birds, considering the progression between modes of inscription as a commentary on modernity, meaning, and presence. Despite At Swim-Two-Birds’s overt commitment to the typewriter’s mode of impersonal, mechanical assemblage, we find, at the novel’s core, inscriptions that are invested in the personal and immediate, and which are driven by intention. The novel’s modernist detachment and technological investments are underpinned by nostalgic desires, ironically and earnestly presented, for the immediacy and presence of more traditional relations with language and the text. By tracing the implications of the writing implements used by the various authors in At Swim-Two-Birds, we uncover a new aspect of the novel’s mediation between modernity and tradition.
This opening chapter lays the groundwork for those that follow, as it reflects on what is at stake in bringing Pacific studies and modernist studies into conjunction. It presents the rise of an anglophone literary movement in Oceania within the context of this conversation, figuring it in terms of the local and transnational forces propelling and preventing a Pacific-driven modernity. Outlining the relationship between the major works and the far greater number of smaller pieces published in the literary periodicals that flourished between 1960 and 1990, this chapter identifies the textual and infrastructural networks that gave Pacific writers a sense of connectedness. Following this historical positioning of Pacific creativity, it outlines the ways in which the contributors’ chapters read Pacific creativity in tandem with modernist preoccupations, mapping the connections between the questions, insights, and nuances that they offer.
and its inhabitants to stagnate in aggressive, nostalgic desire. Relations to the past, to the self, the desired other and power in City of Bohane are inextricable from discourses of melancholic loss, lack, identification, gender, violence and the fetish, and by reading Barry’s work through Freud’s, Agamben’s, Žižek’s and Butler’s theorisations of the melancholy, we explore the tensions between desire, loss and black bile.
Thinking aphoristically means that we think in terms of alternate lines of inheritance and appropriation, and move between the small and the large. Although there is nothing apolitical about the aphorism, this chapter emphasises the importance of the physical and the political within contemporary modernist studies by linking the formal, textual structure of the aphorism to the geographical reach and fluidity of the archipelago, as the latter emphasises the movement between individual islands of thought, as well as the space of relation itself. It brings the aquatic to a modernism too often land-based, and stresses the connections and unpredictable interactions essential to a global modernist approach. To examine the archipelagic aphorism, this chapter turns first to an account of the aphorism, looking specifically at the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, and then to writings on archipelagos, before reading current modernist approaches in terms of oceanic fragments.
The project seeks to explore the relationship between modernity and modernism in the South Pacific. While writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Epeli Hau’ofa and Vanessa Griffen began writing at a later time, their works share many of the formal, thematic and stylistic innovations associated with European modernism. Yet these innovations appear in such distinctive and unsettling ways, arising from local experiences and sensibilities, that they disrupt reductive models of influence or imitation, and justify Oceanic Modernism as a subject deserving of study in its own right.
Oceanic Modernism
Editors: Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long
(University of the South Pacific)
We invite submissions that consider Oceanic modernism/modernity, with possible topics including but not limited to:
• Literature, Art, Theatre, Dance
• Weaving, Tattoos, Architecture, Cultural Practices
• Colonialism and Postcolonialism
• Nationalism and Transnationalism
• Independence, Indigeneity and Indenture
• Tradition and Modernisation
• Globalisation and Capitalism
• Gender, Racial and Cultural Relations
• Influence, Adaptation and Appropriation
Please send your title and a 500-word abstract to oceanicmodernisms@gmail.com by 30 September, 2016. Completed essays will be due by 31st January, 2017.