The article examines Albert Wendt's role in the creation of South Pacific Literature and its crucial passage from an oral to a chirographic medium. Albert Wendt is seen as one of the most outstanding voices of Pacific literature for his choice of a critical regionalism or, in other terms, a 'strategic essentialism'. This is also the aesthetic and cultural choice of a people testifying to the defense of their 'regionalist', but thus not necessarily minority culture, which, without a chirographic codification, would have risked cultural disappearance and exclusion from the wider panorama of the world cultures. Albert Wendt, who has felt the danger for his culture to become one those dead, extinct branches of the Darwinian 'tree' of cultures, has thus chosen to protect the memory and heritage of his autochthonous culture using the novel and its priviledged medium (writing), for his own ends.
Body Politics and Cultural Identity in Albert Wendt’s Darwinian ‘Tree’ of Cultures
BEZRUCKA, Yvonne
2010-01-01
Abstract
The article examines Albert Wendt's role in the creation of South Pacific Literature and its crucial passage from an oral to a chirographic medium. Albert Wendt is seen as one of the most outstanding voices of Pacific literature for his choice of a critical regionalism or, in other terms, a 'strategic essentialism'. This is also the aesthetic and cultural choice of a people testifying to the defense of their 'regionalist', but thus not necessarily minority culture, which, without a chirographic codification, would have risked cultural disappearance and exclusion from the wider panorama of the world cultures. Albert Wendt, who has felt the danger for his culture to become one those dead, extinct branches of the Darwinian 'tree' of cultures, has thus chosen to protect the memory and heritage of his autochthonous culture using the novel and its priviledged medium (writing), for his own ends.
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