Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific

In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific, Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence.

Table of Figures. Preface. Note on Pronunciation. Introduction: Toward a Decolonizing Reading Praxis. 'Messing with' Geography: Resiting the Local. Contexts and Comparisons. Decolonization and Cultural Practice. Beyond and Before Hybridity: Indigeneity, Place, and Multiple, Ongoing Colonization. Fictions of Traumatic History: Intertextuality and Decolonization. Unpacking the Disciplines and Recuperating the Popular, Everyday--A Method for Reading. 1. Trauma and the Construction of Race in Holt's Waimea Summer. Reclaiming a Violent Past: Contact and the 'Ethnographic Uncanny'. The Shape of History: Masking and Adultery. Gothic Novel or Traumatic Realism? 1. Kauikeaouli, Lono, and Pleasure 2. Pi'o Practices 3. Dispossession and the Mahele. Multiple Dialectics of Race and Gender 2. Recounting the Past, Telling New Futures: Albert Wendt's. Leaves of the Banyan Tree and the 'Tropical' Cure. Fanua and the Plantation System. Colonial Infantalization of Orators. O le Mau: Exile, Imprisonment, and Disease. Playing the Wild Card: Reclaiming Orality 3. "Fostering" a New Vision of Maori Community: Trauma, History, and Genealogy in Keri Hulme's the Bone People. Sexual Economy and the Land. Disciplining the Body: Penal Transportation and Evangelicism. New Genealogies out of the Old. Dismantling Discourses: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Novel 4. 'Talkin in Circles': Disrupting the Logic of Property in Pak's Watcher of Waipuna. Class Alliances against Development: Kalama and Waiahole-Waikane. Magic Realism and the Critique of Liberal Ideology. Marginalization and the Law. The Oral/Aural Logic of 'Talking Stink' 5. Making Pakeha History: Familial Resemblances in Jane Campion's "The Piano". Woman, Reproduction, and the Nation. Resemblances. Differences: History and the Fetish. Epilogue. Oppositional Reading: Decolonizing Praxis. Notes. Glossary. References. Index