From disappearing coral reefs and ocean acidification to floating great garbage patches, the Pacific Ocean is an ever-present reminder of the Anthropocene. In Oceanic Becoming, Rob Wilson demonstrates that in the midst of the planetary crises the Pacific now faces, it must be understood as interconnected to the other oceans. Wilson frames this interconnection as “Oceania,” reconceiving the world oceans as tied to sites of urban dwelling and life sustenance-from Boston to Brisbane-that are increasingly threatened by late capitalism. Confronting these threats, Wilson argues, requires a project he theorizes as “worlding”-a process of world-making and world-remaking across Oceania that would create new forms of belonging and connection at local, regional, and transnational levels. Wilson shows how Oceania is not just a site of peril but one charged with emergent literary and social formations that can provide the basis for new solidarities, futures, and ecologies.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Pacific beneath the Pavements: Toward a Blue Ecopoetics of Oceanic Belonging 1
I. Worlding Pacific Poesis
1. Becoming Oceania: Ecopoetics across the Planetary Pacific Rim, or “Walking on Water Wasn’t Built in a Day” 31
2. Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations inside the Anthropocene 51
II. Worlding the Pacific Rim
3. Toward a Blue Ecopoetics: Worlding the Asia Pacific Region into Figurations of Oceania at Monterey Bay 71
4. Migrant Blockages, Global Flows: Worlding San Francisco in a Global-Local and Transoceanic Frame 92
III. Transpacific Conjugations: Unmaking and Remaking Worlds
5. Under a Golden Gate “Mushroom Cloud”: Urban Space, Ecological Consciousness, and the Pedagogy of Blue Conversion 111
6. Hiroshima Sublime: Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia Pacific Imaginary 126
7. Waking to Global Capitalism and Oceanic Decentering: Reworlding US Poetics across Native Hawai‘i and the Pacific Rim 141
Epilogue. Transplanted Poesis: Writing Oceania and the World 161
Notes 167
Bibliography 197
Index
Rob Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of, among other books, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, also published by Duke University Press, and Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.
