ABSTRACT
Oceania’s tryst with modernity began in the early nineteenth century with the arrival of sandalwood and bêche-de-mer traders and commercial whalers, followed swiftly by missionaries. This early encounter prepared the ground for various waves of settlement, the establishment of industrial types of plantation agriculture, the commerce in blackbirded and indentured workers, formal colonisation, and the founding of bustling port cities such as Apia (1850s) and Suva (1880s). Characterised by the movement of people and capital, the region soon displayed all the hallmarks of global modernity, despite the continued European representation of the Pacific Islands as modernity’s antithesis.
Yet even the current delinked or transnational stage of modernity, while generating intermeshed economies and speedy virtual commerce, does not entail our common experience of it, be it globally, nationally, or individually. As a socio-economic practice defined by what Paul Gilroy refers to as ‘antagonistic indebtedness’, Oceanian modernity, while sharing a kinship with some postcolonial contexts, is not simply isomorphous with modernity as found in the North or the South. For writers in Fiji, Samoa, Niue, or Guam, the moment of discontinuity from the past, experienced as a rupture from known life-worlds, imagined or otherwise, is linked to an incursive modernity exemplified by colonial takeover, religious imposition, regulated plantation economies, transported and kidnapped drudgery, introduction of print culture, formal education, militarisation in the wake of the Second World War, Western-style administration, and the rise of port cities. Oceania’s writers certainly encountered Euro-American modernism during their time abroad (as students in Canada or Aotearoa/New Zealand, Britain or Australia), but their writing also owes a substantial debt to the region’s distinct experience of modernity. This chapter identifies modernist attributes in the works of a range of Pacific writers—including Albert Wendt, Subramani, Vilsoni Hereniko, Pio Manoa, John Pule, Satendra Nandan, and Craig Santos Perez—and shows that these derive from the material and temporal difference in their exposure to modernity.
