International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 11, Issue 4, 2008

Oceanic routes focuses on the South Pacific region but also reaches beyond simply francophone shores to encompass English-speaking archipelagoes. It examines the labor-driven population transfers that resulted in the extended exchanges of peoples, languages, customs and cultures that reshaped key aspects of the South Pacific. Geographically, refocusing on the indigenous vision of the region valorizes the term Oceania, originally used to reflect a universe which once comprised not just land surfaces but also the ocean surrounding them. Thus the sea links past and future beyond island boundaries through the transmission of cross-cultural connections and intersections. By contrast, enduring colonial divisions based on geography or language tends to further the legacy of colonialist perspectives and praxes and contribute to the fragmentation and distanciation of the region from the unitary vision of its origins. Such a vision of the island as intrinsically linked to other locales and open to the world naturally calls forth the image of the ship. Inverting this relation such that the vessel remains static and the island is seen as moving, is in keeping with alternative oceanic epistemologies of person and place which valorise both roots and routes.

This article explores metaphors of oceanic migration in contemporary Polynesian writing, investigating the notion of a regional Oceanic identity embraced by a variety of Pacific (and particularly Polynesian) writers and theorists, while also acknowledging the specific historical circumstances and consequences of sea migration within individual Polynesian cultures. Throughout, the essay maintains a multiple temporal focus, identifying the ways in which imagery of the sea and more specifically the traditional Polynesian waka/vaka (voyaging canoe) has been deployed by Polynesian writers as a chronotope not only of pre-European (and early contact) patterns of migration and cultural exchange within the Pacific, but also of the large-scale migrations of Polynesians to various neighbouring nations since the Second World War. The essay also engages with the complex cultural exchanges brought about by various historical phases of European maritime exploration and settlement in the Pacific, analysing how Polynesian writers explore the effects of intermarriage and cultural contact between Polynesians and Europeans since the late eighteenth century. In investigating these patterns of cross-cultural exchange, the essay adopts the French term mtissage, which, alongside the related concepts of hybridity and syncreticity, denotes genetic and cultural exchanges and intermixing. Drawing upon the work of various postcolonial theorists, the essay examines mtissage in the Pacific both at the level of (material) cultural exchange, and within literary texts produced by anglophone and francophone Polynesian writers, particularly those who explicitly identify themselves as of mixed race.

Diversity took a variety of forms during the colonial period. This is why biological mtissage actually gave rise to a plurality of mixed communities. The Austronesian society that took shape in New Caledonia around 1100 BC was no exception. It did not coalesce around the arrival of a single pirogue or a single group from Vanuatu, but rather around the arrival of successive waves of humans from the northwest islands of the Melanesian arc. However, if biological mtissage remained more or less constant during the first three millennia of a human presence in New Caledonia, its examplars were progressively integrated into the dominant culture. Each new wave of human colonization brought with it technological innovations or new social practices. Ultimately, while we can observe a gradual retreat in the perception of mtissage as colonial society's preferred solution, native groups increasingly took a back seat by comparison withf other communities.

In 1975, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, whose name was to become synonymous with the pro-independence movement in New Caledonia, organised the Mlansia 2000 Festival in Noumea. The idea behind this Festival was to bring together Kanak from all over the Territory in an attempt to revive their culture and pave the way for a new postcolonial identity. Tjibaou produced a play-pageant or Jeu Scnique, which was an adaptation of the Kanak foundation myth, Ta Kanak. A quarter of a century later, Dw Gorod, a Kanak writer and activist who had been opposed on political grounds to Mlansia 2000, also adapted this foundation narrative in her play, Knk 2000, written for the 8^th Pacific Arts Festival, which took place in Noumea in 2000. After comparing the tenets, versions and implications of this foundation myth produced by Tjibaou and Gorod, we present an interview with Gorod, who is today Vice-President of the New Caledonian government, in charge of culture.

The canoe has become a material metaphor for the intrepid skill and ancient knowledge of ancestral indigenous migrations and connections and a popular culture symbol of identity in Oceania. I examine the central role played by the great canoes of the ancestors in Pacific literature, especially as the canoe is identified with the mauri or spirit of the land in two well-known novels, The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera and The Bone People by Keri Hulme. The representations of incest, violence against very young women and sexual possession linked to the site of a canoe stone in the first Kanak novel, L'Epave, however, open up a troubling and critical space within such apparently idealizing images. Dw Gorod's text makes explicit the extent to which the locations of the (wrecked) forms of the canoe are shifting at once ancestral, imposed by colonialism and commodified by a global capitalist society. The canoe itself is a hybrid. Hybridity in Gorod's texts derives not only from a century and a half of co-existence with a socio-politically dominant white New Caledonian society but also from a sense of wreckage present behind the surfaces of custom in whose survival and renewal the writer is nonetheless deeply emotionally and politically invested. Through the metonymy of the canoe rock as wreck I argue, Gorod's work connects with other Pacific writing exploring violence and more generally, hybridity. Paradoxically, there is transnationality concealed within the very insularity and cultural-centredness of this single published Kanak novelist. Unspoken questions of the pleasure of the feminine body, its power, and, more particularly, the modes of its exploitation, create connections and migrations across indigenous Pacific communities and between literary texts. In all of these texts, the fluidity and mediation of the sea-voyaging canoe remains a contradictory but not mutually exclusive avatar of the stone, buried deeply in the earth. The voyage into the belly of the canoe is emblematic of the search for both roots and routes, a locus of hybridity seeking to create new third spaces where women have a different place.

In A Personal Narrative of Two Visits to New Zealand, in His Majesty's Ship Alligator, A.D. 1834, William Barrett Marshall draws upon his experiences in New Zealand, specifically his participation in a rescue expedition, to formulate a vigorous critique of military force and irresponsible colonialism, while simultaneously constructing an impassioned argument for the benefits of missionary efforts, both in New Zealand and throughout the British Empire. This paper examines Marshall's narrative in light of postcolonial translation theory, exploring the ways in which the text is itself a selective translation even as Marshall critiques the translations of others, and the ways in which it, and other accounts of the same events, have translated the figure of Betty Guard, a female captive among Maori, in creating colonial narratives of British hegemony and control. As Marshall's text has been translated and re-translated, captured and recaptured, the didactic, seemingly linear tale that it relates has become as multivalent as the voices that Marshall himself translates and has spawned a network of telling that problematizes the very notion of translation that Marshall takes up.

As Teissier-Landgraf's novel Hutu Panu: Tahiti, racines, et dchirements and Chantal Spitz's L'le des rves crass suggest, the concept of a Ma'ohi identity and mtissage is not monolithic. The mtiss identity is shaped by a combination of individual personality traits and preferences, family dynamics and environment. In the spirit of mtissage and migration, Ma'ohi creative and experiential ideas and energies can extend throughout the rest of Polynesia and Oceania, and further outward to the West. Sharing cultural productions, such as art and literature, functions as a powerful medium to resituate Oceanic peoples in dialogue with one another. Such dissemination will generate a long overdue (re)exchange of ideas and literatures between Oceanians that needs to occur vis--vis an intellectual cross-fertilization between formerly and currently colonized nation states. Such a shift will result in more inter-island exchanges and access to thoughts and experiences of other Oceanians. Importantly, this cross-fertilization of ideas will allow Ma'ohi writers to engage in a long overdue era of self-representation within their own Oceanic contexts.

Nicole Cage-Florentiny is one of Martinique's most prolific female writers, albeit little known and even less studied. In this interview she explores the role of women in Martinican society, the reason for disturbed malefemale relationships, problems with adolescents and issues in education. She explains how her upbringing has influenced her work and how her Judeo-Christian education informs what she writes. Her interest in psychotherapy becomes evident in her continuing search to understand people and their actions, and in her attempt to look into their psyches. However, despite Cage-Florentiny's brutal depiction of Martinican society and her relentless portrayal of taboo subjects such as rape, incest and homosexuality, her works express a desire for a new humanism and a future for healthy malefemale relationships.

The Living, Pascale Kramer, translated by Tamsin Black, (2007) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 136 pp., ISBN 978-0-8032-7823-3 (pbk), $19.95

La Belgique entre deux sicles: laboratoire de la modernit, 18801914, Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness (eds), (2007) Bern: Peter Lang, 272 pp., ISBN 3-03910-528-0 (pbk), 52.20, 39.20

criture en transhumance entre Maghreb et Afrique subsaharienne. Littrature, oralit, arts visuels, Hlne Tissires (2007) Paris: L'Harmattan, 293 pp., ISBN 978-2-296-02794-7 (pbk), 27,50

French in Canada: Language Issues, Maeve Conrick and Vera Regan, (2007) Bern: Peter Lang, 186 pp., ISBN 978-3-03910-142-9 (pbk), 40, 26

TOMAN Cheryl (Ed.), On Evelyne Accad. Essays in Literature, Feminism, and Cultural Studies (2007) Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 420 pp., ISBN 978-1-883479-53-4 (hbk), $58 US.

MAXIMIN Daniel, Les fruits du cyclone. Une gopotique de la Carabe (2006) Paris: Seuil, 223 pp., ISBN 2-02-063095-8 (pbk), 22

Migrance compare Comparing Migration: Les littratures du Canada et du Qubec: The literatures of Canada and Qubec, Marie Carrire & Catherine Khordoc (eds), (2008) Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt on Main, New York, Vienna: Peter Lang, 358 pp., ISBN 978-3-03911-317-0 (pbk), 45.30

Algeria Cuts. Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present, Ranjana Khanna, (2008) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 301 pp., ISBN 978-0-8047-5261-9, cloth/ISBN 978-0-8047-5262-6 (pbk), 17.50