| In this dissertation, I posit that the role of the traveler in the Pacific is necessarily framed and informed by competing discourses of the sacred and the secular By focusing on this figure of the "sacred traveler" I address the way that the ambivalent, transgressive, and border-crossing qualities of the sacred works to complicate or blur the oppositional categories self and other, home and abroad, and indigenous and introduced---that have long structured and legislated the more broadly secular mappings of the colonial and post-colonial Pacific. Drawing from texts by early Anglo-American explorers (James Cook), missionaries (William Ellis), and adventurers (Herman Melville), as well as from work by contemporary indigenous and immigrant writers from in and around the Pacific---including Tongan poet Konai Helu Thaman, Maori authors Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, Japanese American novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask---I seek not only to emphasize the way that practices of diaspora and migration usefully informs the construction of "local," grounded, or indigenous identities in the Pacific, but also to chart out unexpected moments of linguistic and literary intersections and genealogical connections that emerge between the variety of immigrant, indigenous, and "settler" narratives of diaspora that crisscross the Pacific region. |
