Conflicted Flows: 21st Century Pacific Narratives Across Media
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2018-05
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Conflicted Flows looks at what I call “medial conflicts”—where stories come up against limit points in terms of medium—and their resolutions in indigenous Pacific Island literature since the turn of the 21st Century. In the Pacific Island texts, films, recordings, and electronic media that I examine, medial conflicts often present obstacles to expression, but I argue ultimately open a productive dialogic space in which media refer to and imitate one another, while bringing attention to and resisting power structures that undergird the region’s expressive culture. Because of the historical proliferation of both traditional and introduced modes of expression, I claim that medial conflicts are characteristic of Pacific expression, and they provide an analytic category for understanding how media develop as a complex chain of responses to cultural and political demands, in addition to technological advances. To tease out some of the ways that Pacific Islanders wrestle with modes of expression, each of my four chapters treats a different medial conflict: a novel centered around a frustrated mute narrator who suffers imprisonment within the representational limits of writing while gesturing toward transcendence; writers and filmmakers using their craft to support the practice of formal oratory in the contemporary global mediascape; a network of poets and musicians that record their poetry on CD, amplifying, remixing, and perpetuating the traditional roots of its stories in a contemporary aural space; and the repurposing of contemporary electronic forms to reinvigorate ancient traditions. My project counters the colonial myth of Pacific Islanders “living in the past,” and, in fact, argues that their contemporary expressions offer ethical ways of approaching new media that are rooted in a robust tradition of inventing, adapting, and contending with modes of expression.
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