Beyond Hostile Islands

Daniel McKay (Author) Daniel McKay is associate professor in the English Department, New Mexico Military Institute. His journal articles have appeared in MELUS, Mosaic, positions: east asia cultures critique, and University of Toronto Quarterly, among others.

Foreword by Patrick Porter vii Introduction 1 1 Revelations and Comedy: The Combat Novel 25 2 Camera Men: Postwar Japan-Bashing 55 3 Captive Memories: Internment North and South 81 4 The Poetics of Apology: FEPOW Narratives 106 5 Scientists and Hibakusha: Project Novels 132 Coda 163 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 177 Bibliography 217 Index 243

Beyond Hostile Islands is an insightful and rewarding investigation of Pacific War literature, particularly that which confronted the economic rise of Japan in the 1980s and that which turned away from the atomic bombings of 1945. By comparing representations of the war across two different canons, the United States' and New Zealand's, McKay is able to bring a strong light to bear on this under-examined area of literary history.---Ian M. Richards, Osaka Metropolitan University, author of To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan A meditative and incisive reading of literature about WWII, Beyond Hostile Islands is book of brilliant comparisons: of US and Aotearoa-New Zealand literatures and of the bellicose topics of combat, internment, propaganda, and nuclear munitions. McKay's reading of what was known as "The Pacific War" takes a hard look at the ambivalences of war and its aftermath, providing a much-needed addition to Anglophone literary and cultural criticism and a new conversation about contemporary American and New Zealand island literatures.---Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Virginia Tech University, author of Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest in Post/Colonial Island Narratives Although it derives from "peacemaking" (pacificus) etymologically, the term "the Pacific" cannot fail to provoke the memory of war ironically. What McKay reveals in this book is not so much the political causes as the literary effects of the war, effects that foregrounded the power of nations by means of racialized stereotypes in narrative form.---Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio Academy of New York, author of Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America In this engagingly-written book, McKay has convincingly bridged the fields of literary studies and memory studies to offer a nuanced and thought-provoking account of the Pacific War in Anglophone literature. The New Zealand/Pacific Islands perspective adds a fresh comparative angle to the more familiar issues within US-Japan literary representations. The impressive range of (hi)stories discussed covers the well-known (Bridge on the River Kwai) to the all-but-forgotten (Japanese internment in New Zealand).---Philip Seaton, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, author of Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical Consciousness of World War II