Since its origins in late eighteenth-century European thought, the idea of placing a regional frame around the Pacific islands has never been just an exercise in geographical mapping. This framing has always been a political exercise. Contending regional projects and visions have been part of a political struggle concerning how Pacific islanders should live their lives. Framing the Islands tells the story of this political struggle and its impact on the regional governance of key issues for the Pacific such as regional development, resource management, security, cultural identity, political agency, climate change and nuclear involvement. It tells this story in the context of a changing world order since the colonial period and of changing politics within the post-colonial states of the Pacific. Framing the Islands argues that Pacific regionalism has been politically significant for Pacific island states and societies. It demonstrates the power associated with the regional arena as a valued site for the negotiation of global ideas and processes around development, security and climate change. It also demonstrates the political significance associated with the role of Pacific regionalism as a diplomatic bloc in global affairs, and as a producer of powerful policy norms attached to funded programs. This study also challenges the expectation that Pacific regionalism largely serves hegemonic powers and that small islands states have little diplomatic agency in these contests. Pacific islanders have successfully promoted their own powerful normative framings of Oceania in the face of the attempted hegemonic impositions from outside the region; seen, for example, in the strong commitment to the ‘Blue Pacific continent’ framing as a guiding ideology for the policy work of the Pacific Islands Forum in the face of pressures to become part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

With the economic crisis in Asia, which unfolded in recent years, the development ‘model’ on which the phenomenal earlier success of several countries in the region was built requires increasing scrutiny. This anthology questions the validity of the notion promoted by some observers and international financial organizations that there is a universally applicable model of industrialization common to Asian countries. A number of senior and highly regarded Asia specialists are taking a critical look at the various development experiences of several (and some often neglected) Asian countries and evaluate their experiences in a comparative perspective. Comparing the analyses of countries such as Mongolia, the Pacific Islands, or Sri Lanka with Singapore, South Korea and other countries of the region leads the editors of this volume to the conclusion that the fashionable talk about a ‘model’ is not justified and that the picture is much more complex.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the heart of the syllabus. From this local core, students ventured outward to contemporary postcolonial literatures, where they saw modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. Only then did they turn to foundational modernist texts, encountered at last as a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote. The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known authors of works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.