1256473 Pacific Insularity - Imaginary Geography of Insular Spaces in the Pacific. Session 4: The Ecological Interconnectedness of the Pacific
Organizer(s):
Thomas Schwarz, University of Tokyo (thomschwarz@yahoo.de)
Within sub-theme 4, “The
Multiple Histories of Comparative Literature”, the
panel on “Pacific Insularity” will discuss the discursive construction of the imaginary geography of Pacific
islands. A key issue of the panel will be the comparison of different literary
constructions of insular spaces in the Pacific where the perspective of the
outsider arriving at Pacific islands is juxtaposed with view-points of the
inhabitants of the islands themselves.
The speakers will investigate the discursive modelling of islands
with a focus on Pacific islands and archipelagos. The imaginary geography of
the Pacific tends to stress the vastness of the ocean as surrounded by a ‘ring’ of volcanic ‘fire’. A featured geographical peculiarity of Pacific islands is the
coral reef, seen as protecting them as a natural ally against the European
invasion. Nonetheless, many Pacific islands share a history of colonization by
Spain, Germany, Japan, France, Britain and the USA. A postcolonial critique of
colonial master narratives is an essential task of this section. In literature
and film, islands are often depicted as small, remote and isolated places, thus
supporting the idea of their economic dependency. Against this discursive “belittlement”, the anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa (1939–2009) argued that it may lead to paralysis,
apathy and fatalism among Pacific islanders. He insists on the “difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands
in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of
islands’”. Starting from this premise, the
contributions to this section will emphasize local cases of encounters and
interactions on the beach with a transpacific reach and engage with translocal
literature from Pacific islands themselves.
In the Western tradition, since Thomas Morus, islands also figure
prominently in utopian literature due to their ‘isolation’ from continental ‘evils’. Bougainville’s ambivalent report made the
Polynesian island of Tahiti or “New Cythera”, the island of “Venus”, on the one hand famous as a site of sexual hospitality. On the
other hand, he described the abject practice of sacrificing humans. In Herman
Melville’s “Moby Dick” (1851), Queequeg’s cannibal island of
Kokovoko is “not down in any map; true places never are”. It is the ambivalent utopian island as ‘no
place’ which turns into the paradigmatic ‘true place’. Starting with Daniel Defoe
(1719), the ‘robinsonade’ became the most popular island narrative in Western literature. Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Jean Giraudoux’s robinsonade “Suzanne and the Pacific” (1921) in his essay “Desert Islands” (1953) is a
pathbreaking landmark of insularity studies. William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” (1954), also set in the Pacific, is an example for the colonial
mindset of explorers, taking possession of what they survey. When the stranded
boys see “a circular horizon of water” from a mountain, the character Ralph declares: “This belongs to us”. At the same time, the
novel unsettles the colonial narrative of the ‘barbaric’ island dwellers versus their European liberators. Insular
microcosms also often represent the stage for dystopian horrors. Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” (1919) is modelled after the French penal colony in New Caledonia.
Pacific islands are the sites of ecological disasters (Easter Island) or
nuclear weapons testing, as depicted in Judith Schalansky’s “Atlas of Remote Islands” (2009).
All these are views from the ‘outside’ of the Pacific islands, even if they question colonialist
approaches. This panel also deals with alternative constructions of insularity
beyond the dominant Western tradition, and explores different perspectives on
literary island constructions apart from the land-sea binary and the notion of
the isolated island; for instance, archipelagic approaches, views of a ‘watery land’ and the Pacific as a ‘water continent’ with open, interconnected
insular worlds, in short postcolonial re-writings of island narratives.
Depending on the positionality of the island(s), the vision of the Pacific would be widely varied. The Pacific imagination underwent dramatic changes through precolonial, colonial and postcolonial times. Taking these circumstances into consideration, this panel explores discourses on islands, archipelagos and peninsulas around the Pacific Rim.