Literary citizenship in the writing of Oceania: The example of Samoan literature

Abstract

In this paper, I am interested in the emergence and articulation of new visions and practices of citizenship as politicized ways of belonging in transnational and globalized contexts, in which the nation or nation state as empowering framework has come to be widely challenged. As I will try to argue, the development such visions and practices calls for an imaginative rethinking of national identity and as such has much to learn from postcolonial situations where the institutions of the Western-style nation state sit uncomfortably on top of (or beside) social formations shaped by long histories of prior occupation and settlement. While such arrangements do not in themselves make for political innovation, they provide imaginative resources for writers whose lives and work chart and explore challenging ways of inhabiting and sharing globalized nation spaces.