Oceanic Becoming

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.

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. Pacific beneath the Pavements: Toward a Blue Ecopoetics of Oceanic Belonging  1I. Worlding Pacific Poesis1. Becoming Oceania: Ecopoetics across the Planetary Pacific Rim, or “Walking on Water Wasn’t Built in a Day”  312. Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations inside the Anthropocene  51II. Worlding the Pacific Rim3. Toward a Blue Ecopoetics: Worlding the Asia Pacific Region into Figurations of Oceania at Monterey Bay  714. Migrant Blockages, Global Flows: Worlding San Francisco in a Global-Local and Transoceanic Frame  92III. Transpacific Conjugations: Unmaking and Remaking Worlds5. Under a Golden Gate “Mushroom Cloud”: Urban Space, Ecological Consciousness, and the Pedagogy of Blue Conversion  1116. Hiroshima Sublime: Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia Pacific Imaginary  1267. Waking to Global Capitalism and Oceanic Decentering: Reworlding US Poetics across Native Hawai‘i and the Pacific Rim  141Epilogue. Transplanted Poesis: Writing Oceania and the World  161Notes  167Bibliography  197Index

“Oceanic Becoming foregrounds Rob Wilson’s contention that new epistemological frameworks are urgently needed to create a more responsive planetary sense of multispecies belonging and becoming. The significance of his notion of Oceania inheres in its potential to open space, time, and consciousness for other values and modes of being. Epic in scope and written in luminous prose, Oceanic Becoming is an outstanding achievement of signal importance.” - Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College “Rob Wilson has the mind of a critic, the heart of a poet, the soul of an excommunicated liberation theologist, and the prose style of a socially astute, fiercely observant novelist. He has written a perpetually cascading oceanic ode, one that draws upon scholarship, reflection, and a life lived to tell the story of the Pacific Ocean and all the lives touched by it. Oceanic Becoming informs and inspires and changes the ways one thinks about the world---about politics, economics, literature---proposing a different way of belonging. It proves that we can still be galvanized by a most ancient of literary forms, the cosmology, disguised though it may be as academic discourse.” - Joseph Donahue, Duke University