An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific

An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiākea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling.

Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that are not confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moʻolelo kamahaʻo and moʻolelo āiwaiwa, Sāmoan fāgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is what inspires and enables the fantastic to flourish.

As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moʻolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling. In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiʻi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.

• ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Editor

  kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi professor of Hawaiian literature at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she specializes in Hawaiian and Pacific literatures and Indigenous place-based perspectives.

• Joyce Pualani Warren, Editor

  Joyce Pualani Warren is a diasporic Black Kanaka Maoli and assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa, where she teaches Hawaiian and Pacific literatures.

• Cristina Bacchilega, Editor

  Cristina Bacchilega is professor emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies.

Contributors

• Māhealani Ahia
• Michael Lujan Bevacqua
• Sarahina Sabrina Birk
• Elizabeth Ua Ceallaigh Bowman
• Marie Alohalani Brown
• Alexander Casey
• Ra’i Chaze
• Laura De La Vega
• Sosthène Desanges
• Joy Lehuanani Enomoto
• Solomon Enos
• Pono Fernandez
• Nicole Ku‘uleinapuananioliko‘awapuhimelemeleolani Furtado
• Sofia Kaleomālie Furtado
• Patricia Grace
• Andrea Nicole Grajek
• Vilsoni Hereniko
• Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
• Kahala Johnson
• Robyn Kahukiwa
• Emelihter Kihleng
• Aaron Ki‘ilau
• Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
• Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada
• Sloane Leong
• Caryn Lesuma
• Nai‘a-Ulumaimalu Lewis
• Tina Makereti
• Selina Tusitala Marsh
• Mahinatea Shea McCallum
• Brandy Nālani McDougall
• Kapili‘ula Naehu-Ramos
• Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng
• Lehua Parker
• Craig Santos Perez
• John Pule
• Peter Rawlingson
• Marama Salsano
• Lyz Soto
• Terisa Siagatonu
• Dan Taulapapa McMullin
• Tiare Ribeaux
• Robert Sullivan
• Nicholas Thomas
• Kristina R. Togafau
• Briana Koani U‘u
• Albert Wendt
• Steven Winduo
• Brittany Winland
• Qianqian Ye