Hybridity theory (the creative dissemi-nation, or restless to-and-fro of Bhabha's Third Space, or of Hall's politics of difference, for example) provides a number of notions that open up our understanding of what may have taken place (or what might yet be produced) in the spaces of cultural contact between France and the Pacific in the French territory of Kanaky-New Caledonia. However, the attempt to circumscribe the particularity of the forms of cultural mixing reflected in both indigenous and settler texts ultimately contests and supplements the notion of hybridity itself. New Caledonian lit ... More

Hybridity theory (the creative dissemi-nation, or restless to-and-fro of Bhabha's Third Space, or of Hall's politics of difference, for example) provides a number of notions that open up our understanding of what may have taken place (or what might yet be produced) in the spaces of cultural contact between France and the Pacific in the French territory of Kanaky-New Caledonia. However, the attempt to circumscribe the particularity of the forms of cultural mixing reflected in both indigenous and settler texts ultimately contests and supplements the notion of hybridity itself. New Caledonian literatures produce their own Pacific and Oceanian differences particular to their changing historical contexts and present strategic positioning but cultural transformation is not unbounded. The local cannot escape the global, yet these literatures maintain, if not an irreducible identity, then at the least a sense of engendering or ancestral origins that continue to distinctively reconfigure the hybridities these relatively unstudied and excitingly different texts create. The marks on the landscapes inscribed in the old Kanak stories are still largely present. The spiral going forward continually remembers and cycles back to an enduring core, in at least a partial return to cultural roots, to a pre-colonial or pre-deportation scene, however compromised by exile and loss, by means of a recovery of foundational myths and legends or the restoration of pride in the creation of a new ‘home’.