| Chapter : | Introduction: “Our Sea of Islands”: Intermingling with Japan |
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She becomes a mother who, though she is raped (colonized), gives birth to a “possibility” that will help her survive modernization and capitalism.
In contemporary times, writers from the Pacific Islands region address Western and colonial art, literature, and education as well as their own oral traditions. During the decolonization of the Pacific from the 1960s onward, literature from the Islands arose in opposition to Western imperial powers. According to Albert Wendt, a leading writer and scholar of Samoan origin, their literature emerged as
In Ola (1991), a text that was ground breaking in the Pacific for its stylistic experiment, Wendt incorporates references to the culture and history of the Japanese as significant elements in his vision. Wendt finds a critical position in contemporary Japan that is different from, and has been marginalized by, political and cultural mainstream discourses. The following chapters look at the postcolonial cultural project of Island writing as it is involved with Japan and examine the position of ethnic Japanese authors settled in the Pacific who wrote within a postcolonial framework, but not as indigenous activists. In doing so, this book suggests that some of the remarkable postcolonial counter discourses by those Island writers against local agencies conspiring with (or emulating) Euro-American and Japanese colonial and neo-colonial hegemonies are, in a sense, in resonance with the postcolonial