Images of Oceania and Polynesia have traditionally been exoticised and
romanticised by Western representations of a "paradise" populated by primitive
natives with grass skirts and ukuleles. However, the movement towards
political independence in the 1960s and 1970s has seen the emergence of a
corpus of indigenous representations that depict and portray the real situation.
These indigenous representations speak of subjugation and moreover testify to
the debilitating effects colonialism has on cultural identities.
The geographical area covered by this thesis is Western Polynesia,
specifically the Pacific Island nations of Fiji, Tonga and Western Samoa and is
concerned with literary representations.
The thesis examines significant developments and trends in the
creative writing of indigenous and migrant writers in these three countries of
Western Polynesia: Western Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, seeing these literary
representations from within as a writing out of multi-faceted aspects of the
shifting identities of Pacific peoples in a post-colonial world.
The introduction focuses on the historical colonial/post-colonial context
of Western Polynesian writing and the socio-political imperatives for change
which have had an impact on these writers and the texts they have produced. It
also discusses the literary and anthropological representation of these
Islanders from the 'outside', from the perspective of a European hegemonic
self, forming the 'orientalist' stereotypes against which the initial texts written by
the Pacific's colonised 'others' in the early 1970's reacted so strongly. Chapter
One sets out the conceptual framework within which these texts will be
discussed and analysed, beginning with indigenous and local concepts which
indigenous and migrant Pacific Islanders use to connect and accommodate
different 'ways of seeing' this representative body of literature, then moving on
to other theorists concerned with literary representation and post-coloniality.
Chapters Two to Nine explore the writing of these three countries,
beginning with the fiction of Albert Wendt, one of the major writers from
Western Polynesia who has an established regional and international literary
reputation, and then progressing to focus on other selected representative
writers of the three countries, including those in the early stages of attempting
publication.
The thesis concludes by discussing the texts from all three countries and
tying them together in the various thematic strands of cultural clash, the
widening of borders, the quest for self-definition and national identity in the
contemporary Pacific, reiterating major points and examining possible future
directions in Western Polynesian writing.
The study takes an interdisciplinary approach to the critical analysis of
Western Polynesian literature, maintaining the importance of seeing them as
important forms of cultural communication in post-colonial contexts, as literary
representations from the inside, writing out of a cultural consciousness which
values the various 'pasts' of Polynesia as definitive 'maps' which provide the
grids and bridges which Pacific Islanders in this part of Oceania can utilise to
mediate their experiences and articulate their identities, to fit the widening
boundaries of the Pacific into a post-colonial global context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219412 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Vaai, Sina Mary Theresa, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Communication, Media & Tourism |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Sina Mary Theresa Vaai |
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