Francophone Oceania Today: Literature, Visual Arts, Music and Cinema is a compilation of essays that breaks new ground in the exploration of recent and contemporary cultural expressions emerging from Francophone Oceania. This books explores Francophone Oceania today: a region rich in literary, artistic, and cultural productions, which nonetheless remains a marginalised space within Francophone Studies and disconnected from the mostly Anglophone cultural networks currently deployed in the South Pacific.
Francophone Oceania Today: Literature, Visual Arts, Music and Cinema establishes an état présent of recent and contemporary Francophone Oceanian literature, visual arts, music and cinema. It measures the local and global diffusion of Francophone Oceanian culture today and examines its key thematic and critical approaches, including ecocritical perspectives on art, literature, and cinema, while proposing new directions for research in the region.
Francophone Oceania Today opens a much-needed critical conversation between scholarly disciplines, between French-speaking and English-speaking academics, and between university researchers, museum professionals, and artistic voices. Our book contains hitherto unpublished contributions by Mā'ohi Nui/French Polynesian writer Chantal T. Spitz and by New Caledonian writer Nicolas Kurtovitch (in English translations by Jean Anderson).
Our book aims to draw interdisciplinary bridges among literature, cinema, music and the visual arts, and to account for the various cross-fertilisations currently happening in the region. Ultimately, what emerges from our volume is a multifaceted reflexion on the contemporary existence of Francophone Oceania, showcasing the diversity of views, artforms, critical perspectives and artistic voices that are gathered across its islands and the sea that surrounds them.
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 authors of 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 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 authors of 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 the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane - perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose - began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written.
As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane's own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane's last work, as death approaches.
Haina ia mai ana ka puana. This familiar refrain, sometimes translated Let the echo of our song be heard, appears among the closing lines in many nineteenth-century chants and poems. From earliest times, the chanting of poetry served the Hawaiians as a form of ritual celebration of the things they cherished--the beauty of their islands, the abundance of wild creatures that inhabited their sea and air, the majesty of their rulers, and the prowess of their gods. Commoners as well as highborn chiefs and poet-priests shared in the creation of the chants. These haku mele, or composers, the commoners especially, wove living threads from their own histoic circumstances and everyday experiences into the ongoing oral tradition, as handed down from expert to pupil, or from elder to descendant, generation after generation.
This anthology embraces a wide variety of compositions: it ranges from song-poems of the Pele and Hiiaka cycle and the pre-Christian Shark Hula for Ka-lani-opuu to postmissionary chants and gospel hymns. These later selections date from the reign of Ka-mehameha III (1825-1854) to that of Queen Liliu-o-ka-lani (1891-1893) and comprise the major portion of the book. They include, along with heroic chants celebrating nineteenth-century Hawaiian monarchs, a number of works composed by commoners for commoners, such as Bill the Ice Skater, Mr. Thurston's Water-Drinking Brigade, and The Song of the Chanter Kaehu. Kaehu was a distinguished leper-poet who ended his days at the settlement-hospital on Molokai.Volume 87 of Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry covers fundamental aspects of the nature of silicate melts and the implications for the systems in which they participate, both technological and natural. The contents of this volume may perhaps best be summarized as structure - properties - dynamics. The volume contains syntheses of short and medium range order, structure-property relationships, and computation-based simulations of melt structure.
It continues with analyses of the properties (mechanical, diffusive, thermochemical, redox, nucleation, rheological) of melts. The dynamic behavior of melts in magmatic and volcanic systems, is then treated in the context of their behavior in magma mixing, strain localization, frictional melting, magmatic fragmentation, and hot sintering. Finally, the non-magmatic, extraterrestrial and prehistoric roles of melt and glass are presented in their respective contexts.