Oceanic peoples in dialogue: French Polynesian literature as transnational link

Ma'ohi people's transnational ties with other Oceanic communities have been severed due to colonial and imperial practices that have separated the Pacific into three orientalizing spaces, namely Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia and imposed their colonial languages thereupon. Since much of Ma'ohi writing is in French, or the local Franitien, French Polynesia remains marginalized from anglophone Oceania, and Ma'ohi artistic, cultural, and literary production remains absent from Oceanic criticism. In the Pacific, Oceanic discourse reveals an Oceanic consciousness, which entails recovering alternate histories, reading Oceania based on its diverse cultural contexts, privileging indigenous epistemologies, and decentring western authoritative and patriarchal discourses. Drawing upon Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic and Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau'ofa's ideas, this essay views transnationalism through a metaphoric lens using Ma'ohi literature as the va'a or canoe, to re-bridge Oceanic peoples in a transnational context.