ABSTRACT
This book offers an introduction to the contemporary postcolonial literatures of the Pacific through a focus on eight of its most renowned writers, examining the various ways in which these writers negotiate a central preoccupation in Pacific indigenous literature in English: the representation of the indigenous body. Rather than attempting to undertake a survey of the entire corpus of indigenous Pacific literatures, which have emerged from a large and diverse range of cultures spread across the vast Pacific Ocean, I have chosen to focus upon the South Pacific region, and more specifically upon a group of Maori and Pacific Island writers situated within the geographical and conceptual category of Polynesia. These include Samoan writers Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel; Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa;1 Cook Island writer Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; and New Zealand Maori writers Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Alan Duff.
