Associate Professor
najita@umich.eduOffice Information:
3176 Angell Hall
hours: Wednesday 1-2 p.m. & by appointment
Postcolonial Studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander; Disability and Trauma Studies; Graduate Faculty; Novel and Narrative; Twentieth Century American; Ecocriticism; American; Visual Culture; Law and Literature; Language Studies; English; Theory; Gender and Sexuality
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., UC-Santa Barbara 2001
Highlighted Work and Publications
Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading, History and Drama in Contemporary Fiction
Susan Najita
Popular imaginings of the Pacific Islands as earthly paradises or escapes for the weary have obscured the long historical reality of violence-cultural, physical, environmental and political-under the European and U.S. empires that sought out these islands of Oceania as one of the last frontiers. Today, islanders are writing back. In "Decolonizing Culture in Pacific Literature" Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence... See More