Somerville, Alice Te Punga. 2012. Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $67.50 hc. $22.50 sc.pp. Reviewed by Sherrie L. Stewart University of Arizona Alice Te Punga Somerville’s recent study Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania invites readers to board her waka, an ocean-going canoe, to journey through waves of time and genres in search of “a kind of regional identification” (xxx) that spans much of the Pacific region. Somerville’s artful use of painting and poetry, fiction and physical spaces, along with contemporary media and music, all enhanced by her insider perspective of Māori material culture, draw lines of connection on the South Pacific chart from Aotearoa to Samoa, from the Cook Islands to Tahiti, extending all the way to Hawai‘i, and then returning to Wellington Harbor in New Zealand. Critical yet imaginative, formalist, and specifically indigenist, the analyses throughout this work are informative, entertaining, and engaging. muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v2014/2014.1.stewart.html
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 22:09:49 +0000
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