Moving Islands reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theater, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe. Diana Looser’s study moves beyond a predictable country-specific or island-specific focus to encompass an entire region defined by diversity and global exchange, showing how performance operates to frame social, artistic, and political relationships across widely dispersed locations. The study also demonstrates how Oceanian performance contributes to international debates about diaspora, indigeneity, urbanization, and environmental sustainability. The author considers the region’s unique cultural and geographic dynamics as she brings forth the paradigm of transpasifika to suggest a way of understanding these intercultural exchanges and connections, with the aim to “rework the cartographic and disciplinary priorities of transpacific studies to privilege the activities of Islander peoples.”

Entries from the long-lost journal of Ven, a Nain youth, relate his adventures as he faces pirates and is rescued by a mermaid and a kindly sea captain who sends Ven to an inn, where he encounters fairies, ghosts, and other strange boarders.

William Wall is the first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control. We witness three stages of the sisters' lives, each taking place on an island—in southwest Ireland, southern England, and the Bay of Naples. Beautifully and sparsely written, the stories deeply evoke landscape and character, and are suffused with a keen eye for detail and metaphor.

A pathbreaking exploration of the international and intercultural connections within Oceanian performance

This volume examines how Indigenous theatre and performance from Oceania has responded to the intensification of globalisation from the turn of the 20th to the 21st centuries. It foregrounds a relational approach to the study of Indigenous texts, thus echoing what scholars such as Tui Nicola Clery have described as the stance of a “Multi-Perspective Culturally Sensitive Researcher.” To this end, it proposes a fluid vision of Oceania characterized by heterogeneity and cultural diversity calling to mind Epeli Hau‘ofa’s notion of “a sea of islands.” Taking its cue from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, the volume offers a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical approach to the study of the various shapes of Indigeneity in Oceania. It covers Indigenous performance from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hawai’i, Samoa, Rapa Nui/Easter Island, Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Each chapter uses vivid case histories to explore a myriad of innovative strategies responding to the interplay between the local and the global in contemporary Indigenous performance. As it places different Indigenous cultures from Oceania in conversation, this critical anthology gestures towards an “imparative” model of comparative poetics, favouring negotiation of cultural difference and urging scholars to engage dialogically with non-European artistic forms of expression.

This book is a unique treasury of information about one of nature's marvels: floating islands. It bibliography contains more than 1,500 citations of books and articles in 20 languages on the subject. The entries are annotated and cross-referenced, and there are both thematic and geographic indices. All aspects of floating islands are addressed.