ABSTRACT
The Caribbean archipelago has been perhaps the most fertile and resourceful generator of postcolonial future thinking. But there is a similar orientation to the Not-Yet-Become in another island region: the Pacic, including the island nations of Polynesia, Melanesia and to a smaller extent Micronesia – those islands described by the utopian term “Oceania.” The history of this region diers greatly from that of the Caribbean. Here the indigenous people maintain a continuous connection to an Oceanic past, in contrast to the slave society’s severance from an African (or Asian)1 homeland. Yet both share the same need for identication with something larger, whether geographically, historically or imaginatively, and this takes form in both regions in a regional, archipelagic consciousness. In the Pacic this utopian dimension has come to be recognized as “Oceania,” an ingenious redenition of the signicance of islands that had seemed tiny, insignicant and marginal. Oceania is not only itself the name for a utopian formation, but of a particular attitude to time and within which the remembrance of the past becomes a form of forward thinking that embeds itself in a vision of the achievable – a concrete utopia. “Oceania” owes its very meaning to the persistent reality of the crosscurrents of time and space in the region.
