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Susan Y. Najita (2006) Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction, London, Routledge, 240pp, ISBN: 978-041536669-4. Pbk US$35.95.
Pacific Island literary studies have grown exponentially in the past decade, and Susan Y. Najita's excellent Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction is a wonderful addition to the field. Rather than placing the Anglophone Pacific Islands in a subservient relationship to their colonizers, Great Britain and the United States, Najita places the literature (and film) of Hawai'i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand in a comparative dialogue, displacing colonial centers and exploring the ways in which cultural production from the Pacific reconfigures historical trauma. Although a deeply historicist text, each chapter of Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific also problematizes historiography as a colonial project, highlights the ways in which indigenous authors in particular recuperate oral storytelling, cosmologies, and genealogies which are vital to addressing the violence and rupture of the colonial past. Bringing together the fields of American, Pacific, Postcolonial, and trauma studies, Najita's book weaves skillfully between texts and contexts to give us a compelling argument and frame for approaching Pacific Island literatures.
Najita's book, like...