Category: Manoa

The March 2009 issue of the University of Hawai‘i magazine Mālamalama contains a profile of the history of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. It also offers two web extras: a slideshow of some of its cover designs and an audio interview with Mānoa editor Frank Stewart.

Mānoa passed two milestones in 2008: completing its 20th year of publishing and making its debut in the JSTOR online archive.

Visit Mānoa’s 20th Anniversary blog for a another brief history of its founding and a few highlights of its literary achievements over the years.

Every published volume of Mānoa is now available online. Since 2000, current issues have been appearing in Project MUSE (subscription required). In 2008, all prior volumes made their digital debut in JSTOR (subscription required). The JSTOR moving wall is 3 years. In other words, newer volumes will be added to the JSTOR archive 3 years after they first appear in print.

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Voices from Okinawa: Featuring Three Plays by Jon Shirota

Edited by Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato

VOICES FROM OKINAWA features through literature the rich and remarkable culture of Japan’s southernmost islands. In this landmark publication—the first literary anthology showcasing Okinawan Americans—Okinawan voices are heard in plays, essays, and interviews. Through the beauty, humor, and heartbreak in Jon Shirota’s award-winning plays, readers will discover the exuberance and excellence of Okinawan American literature. And in personal essays and interviews, the compelling life stories are told of June Hiroko Arakawa, Philip K. Ige, Mitsugu Sakihara, and Seiyei Wakukawa. The distinctive cultural perspectives and literary excellence of VOICES FROM OKINAWA show that American literature is more inclusive, complex, and multilayered than we have imagined.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 21, no. 1 (2009): Voices from Okinawa”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Enduring War: Stories of What We’ve Learned

Edited by Frank Stewart

The stories, essays, and poems in this volume render the effects of war in our time and the shadows they cast, from the Pacific campaigns of World War II to genocide under the Khmer Rouge to hostilities in the Middle East. Soldiers, however, are not in the foreground in most of these works. More often, the writers depict war as a destructive force on the lives of children, women, and other civilians, and capture the lasting, complex ways in which innocent individuals and communities are harmed.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 20, no. 2 (2008): Enduring War”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination

Edited by Frank Stewart and Barry Lopez

In this collection of essays, fiction, and poetry set in South America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Asia, the United States, and elsewhere, a diverse group of writers explores the role of literature in confronting the most pressing issue of our time: how individuals, communities, and nations can reconcile differences and grievances and forge a future with a renewed sense of dignity and mutual respect.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 20, no. 1 (2008): Gates of Reconciliation”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination

Edited by Frank Stewart and Barry Lopez

In this collection, the editors turn to some of the world’s most thoughtful authors — in fiction, essay, poetry, drama, and parable — to ask important questions about the future, to give us moral direction, individual courage, and a map toward reconciliation. In many voices and dialects, they urge us to be attentive and compassionate — somehow, as guest editor Barry Lopez writes, to bring hope to bear on the things that confound us. “We start with our instinct for reconciliation, to address the war in the self, the war in the kitchen, the war in Sudan.”

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 19, no. 2 (2007): Maps of Reconciliation”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Crossing Over: Partition Literature from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Edited by Frank Stewart and Sukrita Paul Kumar

Crossing Over comprises stories from three South Asian countries—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—with a combined population of over two billion. The works here focus on the cataclysmic experiences of Partition in 1947 and its aftermath, including the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. Many of these works have not been readily accessible to American and other English-speaking readers; they serve as a mere glimpse at a rich and vast body of literature being produced in many languages of the Subcontinent.
Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 19, no. 1 (2007): Crossing Over”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Where the Rivers Meet

Where the Rivers Meet is a remarkable collection of new fiction, essays, and poetry from Australia, a complex society and a country with a multilayered history. Among Australia’s many resources is a large community of outstanding writers that includes a growing number of novelists, poets, and essayists of Indigenous descent. Their stories—many of them previously untold in literature—deepen and expand our understanding of the experiences that make up Australia’s past and present.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 18, no. 2 (2006): Where the Rivers Meet”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Beyond Words

Beyond Words presents more than two dozen authors from China, Tibet, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Malaysia discussing their particular approaches to writing. The editors have collected their words as they appear in essays, interviews, stories, and poems and have sought diversity in nationality, language, age, gender, and aesthetics.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): Beyond Words”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Varua Tupu

Varua Tupu—the first anthology of its kind—offers English-speaking readers the stories, memoirs, poetry, photography, and paintings of a French Polynesian artistic community that has been growing in strength since the 1960s. In the literature and images of Varua Tupu, the people of this astonishing group of islands speak for themselves.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 17, no. 2 (2005): Varua Tupu”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Blood Ties

Blood Ties presents work from rural and urban China, Tibet, Singapore, and the U.S. Through fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and artwork, this volume explores the complexities of Chinese identity created by migration, displacement, ethnic mixing, and separation from homeland. Individuals whose identities have been made more complex by rapid globalization will find these works especially meaningful.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005): Blood Ties”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

Jungle Planet

Jungle Planet and Other New Stories features new works of fiction, biography, and drama, plus artwork. These selections span time and place: a young man encounters a palm reader on a San Francisco bus; an old woman recalls the Japanese Occupation of Malaysia; a group of Cheyenne Indians journey to the edge of the known world; and, in the title piece, a child enjoys exotic animals on cable television as the outside world disintegrates.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 16, no. 2 (2004): Jungle Planet”

Presented by Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

In the Shadow of Angkor

Published twenty-five years after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge regime, In the Shadow of Angkor captures the resurgence of the Cambodian arts community and its efforts to restore a rich literary heritage. In many of the works, the artists defy the decimation of their brothers and sisters by the Khmer Rouge, as well the attempt to erase Cambodia’s memory of its history. The range of expression is impressive: the volume includes poetry, short story, film, rap lyrics, and essays, plus interviews with authors and a portfolio of photographs of Cambodia.

Guest-edited by Sharon May and featuring photographs by Richard Murai.

Continue reading “Manoa, vol. 16, no. 1 (2004): In the Shadow of Angkor”