Not E-mailing Albert: A Legacy of Collection, Connection, Community

Abstract

Albert Wendt’s literary and critical legacy in the Pacific is well documented and loudly acknowledged; what is less widely recognized is his work as an anthologist. This article explores the impact of Wendt’s literary collections, focusing on the extent to which the regional anthologies have produced not only a record of writing in the Pacific but also connections between writers. Unlike the regional and national anthologies of elsewhere, which perform the task of representing the canonical tip of a large body of work, anthologies in the Pacific have often had a different job. Pacific anthologies have become archives of writing, repositories of elsewhere unpublished texts, sites of contestation, and—perhaps most significantly—articulations of a region.