Oceanic Becoming: The Pacific Beneath the Pavements

From disappearing coral reefs and ocean acidification to floating great garbage patches, the Pacific Ocean is an ever-present reminder of the Anthropocene. In Oceanic Becoming, Rob Wilson demonstrates that in the midst of the planetary crises the Pacific now faces, it must be understood as interconnected to the other oceans. Wilson frames this interconnection as “Oceania,” reconceiving the world oceans as tied to sites of urban dwelling and life sustenance-from Boston to Brisbane-that are increasingly threatened by late capitalism. Confronting these threats, Wilson argues, requires a project he theorizes as “worlding”-a process of world-making and world-remaking across Oceania that would create new forms of belonging and connection at local, regional, and transnational levels. Wilson shows how Oceania is not just a site of peril but one charged with emergent literary and social formations that can provide the basis for new solidarities, futures, and ecologies.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  vii Introduction. Pacific beneath the Pavements: Toward a Blue Ecopoetics of Oceanic Belonging  1 I. Worlding Pacific Poesis 1. Becoming Oceania: Ecopoetics across the Planetary Pacific Rim, or “Walking on Water Wasn’t Built in a Day”  31 2. Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations inside the Anthropocene  51 II. Worlding the Pacific Rim 3. Toward a Blue Ecopoetics: Worlding the Asia Pacific Region into Figurations of Oceania at Monterey Bay  71 4. Migrant Blockages, Global Flows: Worlding San Francisco in a Global-Local and Transoceanic Frame  92 III. Transpacific Conjugations: Unmaking and Remaking Worlds 5. Under a Golden Gate “Mushroom Cloud”: Urban Space, Ecological Consciousness, and the Pedagogy of Blue Conversion  111 6. Hiroshima Sublime: Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia Pacific Imaginary  126 7. Waking to Global Capitalism and Oceanic Decentering: Reworlding US Poetics across Native Hawai‘i and the Pacific Rim  141 Epilogue. Transplanted Poesis: Writing Oceania and the World  161 Notes  167 Bibliography  197 Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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