Description:
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.Brief description:
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa Amelika (American Samoa). His book of poems Coconut Milk (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year.
Taulapapa's artwork has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Oakland Museum, Bishop Museum, NYU's /A/P/A Gallery, and the United Nations. His performance poem The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. His film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award. His film 100 Tikis is an art appropriation video at the intersection of tiki kitsch and indigenous sovereignty, and was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone First Peoples Festival in Montreal; and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti International Oceania Documentary Film Festival and at Pacifique Festival in Rochefort, France. His art studio and writing practice is based in Hudson, New York, where he lives with his partner Stephen. Taulapapa is currently working on a novel. His work can be viewed at www.taulapapa.com.