Design, Research, Writing
Research tracing the circulation of Tuvaluan literature to explore how Pacific writers challenge colonial narratives and call for reciprocal, community-grounded models of knowledge exchange. Presented at e-flux, Inc. with Dr. Marina Otero Verzier as part of her lecture "When Pixels Wash Ashore".
“The sea,” as has been written, “is not a metaphor.” In the Pacific today, this assertion carries a particular urgency. Rising tides breach seawalls, flood villages, saturate farmland, and erode the borders of island nations. Bleached coral reefs, declining fish stocks, and intensifying cyclones do not speak in allegories but in material transformations. These phenomena underscore the real power of the ocean in the era of the Anthropocene.
Through the process of colonization, the vast Pacific region was subjected to imposed names for its ocean and islands, and its diverse Indigenous cultures were classified into the geo-cultural categories of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia. This reclassification disrupted Indigenous systems of knowledge and governance, fragmenting long-standing cultural and spatial connections.
And yet, as writers such as Epeli Hauʻofa reminds us, the Pacific Ocean has also long served as one of the region’s most powerful metaphors. Oceanian authors and scholars have transformed the ocean from a symbol of isolation and precarity into a medium of abundance, movement, and relation.
Travelling to Tuvalu and witnessing firsthand how land change is not necessarily experienced as loss, but rather as a fixed condition in constant flux, led me to consider how, beyond being an environmental symptom, coastal transformation can act as a conceptual tool—challenging continental and terra-centric frameworks. This duality between the material and the metaphoric, between ecological crisis and cultural vitality, shapes the epistemologies and literatures of the Pacific.
In his essay Towards a New Oceania (1976), Samoan writer Albert Wendt envisions Pacific literature as a means of uniting the region beyond colonial-imposed boundaries. He described the artistic renaissance as a force of cultural renewal, reinforcing indigenous identities and creating an interconnected network of writers, editors, and literary forums. In this spirit, contemporary Pacific movements have begun to refer to themselves as Large Ocean Nations, rather than Small Island Developing States, asserting their centrality in the stewardship of marine worlds.
While the Anthropocene disproportionately threatens Oceanic life while continuing to ignore Pacific epistemologies, this project turns to Oceanic literature as both archive and imaginative geography. This research proposes that these literary anthologies serve as tools for reworlding world literature: they decenter Eurocentric poetics and call for reciprocity, and relation.
My interest in Pacific Islander literary anthologies also emerged from the difficulty of locating Tuvaluan literary works. During our trip to Tuvalu, I met Mamao, the librarian responsible for the curation of Tuvalu’s national collection of literature and archival material. She introduced me to Tuvalu: A History, the first national anthology collaboratively written by Tuvaluans from each island and published in 1983. Despite efforts to access the anthology online, only fragmented references could be found—most of which were broken links.
I also had the opportunity to meet Tito, one of the contributing authors of the anthology. These conversations formed the backbone of this essay, as they shaped my approach to tracing the circulation of Tuvalu: A History—while situating this case within broader debates about the access, circulation, and stewardship of Oceanic literary anthologies.
Rather than assimilating Oceanic literature into global repositories that rely on digital infrastructures without acknowledging their potential roles in extraction and violence, writers such as Tito call for protocols for archiving cultural materials that both protect the rights of knowledge holders and respond to the needs of Pacific Islander diasporas. Long-term access and control over these materials remain hosted on platforms outside the sovereignty of the communities they represent. Limited internet access within Tuvalu starkly restricts local use of these supposedly open-access resources. The Tuvaluan archive is actively working to digitize its records, but infrastructural conditions continue to hinder this process.
This disjunction calls for a reevaluation of what it means to circulate Oceanic texts, urging instead a model of archipelagic circulation: reciprocal, and grounded in the infrastructural, cultural, and political conditions of the region. This booklet exhibits the different sources informing the research. This project was intended to open up new dialogues, and in this context, it initiated one between Tuvaluan authors and librarians and Columbia University’s South Pacific literature department. It represents an initial step toward facilitating more reciprocal, community-grounded literary and archival exchange—one that honors the rights of local custodians, and makes literary and cultural resources more accessible to Tuvaluans at home and abroad.
More broadly, it affirms that Pacific literary texts such as Tuvalu: A History are not merely cultural artifacts. They are active participants in shaping future imaginaries of environmental memory, decolonial knowledge, and regional solidarity.
Columbia GSAPP I Spring 2025 I Instructors: Marina Verzier Otero, Daniel Miller I Tools: Adobe Suite, ArcGIS Pro