For Indigenous Pacific Islanders, the ocean is not a metaphor. Land and water are genealogically related to people, providing the physical and ancestral links that connect, rather than divide. This “Oceanitude” is a central framework for The Ocean on Fire, in which author <!—StartFragment—>Anaïs Maurer investigates what she calls  (post)apocalyptic stories—both literary and visual—that offer strategies for mourning, healing, survival, and regeneration in the face of nuclear imperialism. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the French, US-American, and British militaries conducted nuclear bomb tests in Tahiti, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati, among others not explored in this book. The tests irradiated the landscape, poisoned aquifers, and killed or displaced Indigenous Islanders. The (post) in Maurer’s “(post)apocalyptic” signals the continuing effects of Cold War nuclearism into the present, as toxic waste from the tests leaks into the ocean as sea levels rise and storm events occur with more intensity.

Mobilizing genealogical connection to place as a uniting, collective force, the contemporary artists and writers included in The Ocean on Fire look to their ancestors for creative approaches to resisting, surviving, and thriving. “Retracing how customary Indigenous orature and visual technologies persist and flourish in the age of the atom,” Maurer argues in the introduction, “reaffirms the strength of Pacific cultures in the face of past, future, and ongoing apocalypses” (20). The following chapters explore specific works that mobilize such “transgenerational aesthetics” in the face of nuclear trauma and climate collapse.

For example, many writers draw from oratory and performative arts that flourished among island cultures before missionization and colonization. Writer Chantal T. Spitz uses the rhythms of customary Tahitian public speaking, ʻōreroraʻa parau, in her short story rebuking opportunistic developers who want to build artificial islands off the coast of Tahiti. Visual artists Bobby Holcomb, André Marere, Cronos, and THS! maintain the legacy of Tahitian ari’ohi—16th-century performance artists who used parody and humor in their political satire. And the famed author Albert Wendt draws on Samoan comedy sketches, fale aitu, when he uses dark humor in the antinuclear novel Black Rainbow.

Maurer also investigates how ancestral practices of mourning have proven useful for artists and writers today in the face of death, illness, and loss after the nuclear detonations and in the face of species extinction. The poet Craig Santos Perez “recycles” CHamoru lisåyon linahyan, or public prayers for the dead, in his prose about militarism and US occupation in Guam. And activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s “visual literature” (144) combining poetry and film repeatedly evokes the Marshallese funerary rite, eorak, to mourn for the islands who were destroyed by Castle Bravo in 1954.

In mobilizing transgenerational aesthetics, the texts and images included in this book exemplify the Oceanitude that Maurer outlines early in the book. Coined by the ni-Vanuatu novelist Paul Tavo in 2015, the term plays on the 20th-century “Negritude” movement. But while Negritude centers race as the unifying concept around which Black identities formed at the time, Maurer insists that Oceanitude emphasizes ancestral connection to each other and to place. Transgenerational aesthetics, such as those described earlier, provide one means by which these ancestral connections are formed, re-formed, and maintained in the face of structural violence and militarism that haunts Pacific peoples to this day.

By using customary forms of oratory, performance, and ritual, Maurer argues, these storytellers mobilized transgenerational aesthetics and “reclaimed the right to represent their peoples’ suffering in their own way” (119). This is a pointed refusal to be represented by the myths and imaginaries of the Euro-American West, an ideology that Maurer calls “Isletism.” The book’s opening chapter outlines three concepts by which the idea of island cultures has been constructed in “Western” imaginations. First is the idea that tropical islands are isolated arcadias, the “prelapsarian heavens” (44) of the noble savage. The second is the “morbid erotica” (41) that emerged in journals, travelogues, and popular culture in which the Polynesian female body becomes the symbol for that arcadia. Third is the idea that Indigenous Islanders are doomed to disappear in the face of “civilization” and human “progress.” Maurer compellingly shows how this served as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because the idea that Indigenous Islanders will inevitably disappear created the very conditions by which Indigenous people were violently killed and live continuously under the threat of “annihilation racism.” Maurer uses this term to describe how the nuclear tests conducted by the French and US militaries were predicated on the idea that small, isolated islands are outside of history and therefore outside of accountability. The structural erasure not only of the tests themselves but their poisonous aftereffects is another form of annihilation racism, as are the medical tests conducted on islanders who were exposed to radiation. The Oceanitude exhibited by the writers and artists in this book attests to the resilience and persistence of island cultures despite annihilation racism.

The first two chapters of The Ocean on Fire walk us through the two framing theoretical concepts of the book: Oceanitude and Isletism. The following three chapters investigate how writers and artists are resisting isletist tropes by invoking transgenerational aesthetics in the face of species loss (chapter three), radiation poisoning (chapter four), and forced migration (chapter five). An antinuclear poster by the artist Bobby Holcomb transforms the image of an inviting Polynesian maiden into a tupapa’u, a Tahitian spirit of the dead who now haunts the Edenic paradise that occupies Euro-American imaginations. Painter André Marere similarly upends the “dusky maiden” trope in his parody of Gauguin’s famous portraits of Tahitian vahine (women), while the Tahitian street artist Cronos visualizes the nuclear atrocities that were erased in the alluring 1950s tourist postcards featuring bare-chested women. And in the literary examples, many of the (post)apocalyptic narratives by Pacific writers are adamant refusals of the isletist notion that Indigenous Islanders were inevitably doomed to extinction. Alexandre Ata’s 2011 novel Tautai, for example, ironically rewrites an 18th-century fatal impact novel about the end of Tahitian culture. In doing so, Ata’s novel insists “Tahitians have nevertheless managed to survive and laugh in this apocalyptic setting” (124). 

Survival, resilience, and regeneration form the backbone for each case study as Pacific writers and artists respond to the horrors of nuclear and climate imperialism. They mourn species loss through customary rites, rituals, and songs; they humorously satirize those responsible for nuclear imperialism with performative and public speaking methods practiced for centuries; and they cope with the loss of one’s homeland through Pacific-based metaphor. The emphasis on culturally informed approaches to 21st-century experiences by Indigenous Islanders today provides a useful framework for Indigenous studies beyond the Pacific. The chapters on Isletism and Oceanitude, in particular, could be a major contribution to Indigenous and (post)colonial studies because they articulate key differences between Indigenous experiences and those of other racialized groups.

While the bulk of the stories Maurer analyzes are textual, the author uses “stories” in an expansive sense to include “print, oral, digital, embodied, and visual” aesthetics (19). This approach is fitting when studying historical and customary arts of Oceania, for an artwork (a textile, a building, a mask, for example) cannot be separated from the oratory arts, singing, dancing, and music that engulf and transform the object. Maurer’s text contributes to the ongoing effort in Pacific studies to dismantle the academic hierarchies of history-telling and knowledge production, which tend to prioritize written texts. So, while this book seems most relevant for literary studies and ecocriticism, it offers an exciting framework for how to meaningfully integrate visual studies and art history with the literary arts.

This book also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on nuclear testing and militarism in occupied lands and waters. There has recently been a surge in texts about the role of art and creative production in antinuclear and climate justice movements. In fact, the same cover image—Nuclear Hemorrhage (2017) by Joy Lehuanani Enomoto—appears on the recently published volume Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism Across the Pacific edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024). Resisting the Nuclear focuses on art and activism in the American Pacific, with essays about the US nuclear programs in Nevada and the Marshall Islands, and the repercussions of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maurer’s book, on the other hand, accounts for nuclear histories in the broader region of Oceania, focusing especially on the French testing program in Tahiti but also including the British testing in Kiribati and the further reaches of American imperialism in Guam and the Marshall Islands. Because of its deep attention to Indigenous Pacific epistemologies and narrative forms practiced for generations, Maurer’s book is also in conversation with what Talei Luscia Mangioni has recently described as “art/story”: the multisensorial, multimodal way nuclear stories are constructed and passed on (The Journal of Pacific History, 2024, 37–59). Mangioni calls for “scholars to engage in making accessible and creative histories” (51), and The Ocean on Fire is an exemplary part of that effort.