Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014), as well as the editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018) and co-editor, with Matthew Hayward, of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019).
Maebh Long
Contributions
Traveling Editors, Little Magazines and Postcolonial Modernism: Ulli Beier, Black Orpheus and Kovave
Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine.
Towards an Oceanian Modernism
In an essay on Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence describes the Pacific Islands as “a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like, continues the life of myriads of ages back.” Modernist studies has yet to awaken from this dream of Oceania as the hazy antithesis of modernity, a place “not come to any modern consciousness”: although the tide is turning, the Pacific has typically been treated not as an active site of cultural production, but as a tropical backdrop for the adventures of the likes of Gauguin, Stevenson, and Melville (Lawrence, “Herman Melville,” 114). Uncalculated as this scholarly exclusion may be, it cannot but reinforce the sense that modernism and modernity demand an unmodern Other, figuring Pacific peoples in binaries that the new modernist studies has worked to undermine.