Marie Alohalani Brown – författare

A unique anthology of mermaid tales from around the world, many of which have never appeared in English beforeAmong the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid'. As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified 'mermaid' specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real.The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid - at once a human and a fish - illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology and sexuality.

Tradition holds that when you come across a body of freshwater in a secluded area and everything is eerily still, the plants are yellowed, and the water covered with a greenish-yellow froth you have stumbled across the home of a mo‘o. Leave quickly lest the mo‘o make itself known to you! It might eat (‘ai) you or take you as a lover (ai); either way, you will be consumed completely.Revered and reviled, reptiles have slithered, glided, crawled, and climbed their way through the human imagination and into prominent places in many cultures and belief systems around the world. Ka Po‘e Mo‘o Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities explores the fearsome and fascinating creatures known as mo‘o that embody the life-giving and death-dealing properties of water. Mo‘o are not ocean-dwellers; instead, they live primarily in or near bodies of freshwater. They vary greatly in size, appearing as tall as a mountain or as tiny as a house gecko, and many possess alternate forms. Moʻo are predominantly female, and the female moʻo that masquerade as humans are often described as stunningly beautiful.During an earlier period in Hawaiian history, mo‘o akua held distinctive roles and filled a variety of functions in overlapping familial, societal, economic, political sectors. Religion, people’s belief in mo‘o akua, was the foundation upon which these roles and functions were established. Marie Alohalani Brown’s extensive research in Hawaiian-language archives has recovered knowledge about more than three hundred moʻo. In addition to being a comprehensive treatise on moʻo akua, this work includes a detailed catalog of 288 individual mo‘o with source citations. It makes major contributions to the politics and poetics of reconstructing ʻike kupuna (ancestral knowledge), Hawaiian aesthetics, the nature of tradition, the study and appreciation of moʻolelo and kaʻao (hi/stories), genre analysis and metadiscursive practices, and methodologies for conducting research in Hawaiian-language newspapers. An extensive introduction also offers readers context for understanding how these uniquely Hawaiian deities relate to other reptilian entities in Polynesia and around the world. Accessibly written about a captivating subject, this extraordinary monograph is the result of over two decades of dedicated study.

Tradition holds that when you come across a body of freshwater in a secluded area and everything is eerily still, the plants are yellowed, and the water covered with a greenish-yellow froth you have stumbled across the home of a mo‘o. Leave quickly lest the mo‘o make itself known to you! It might eat (‘ai) you or take you as a lover (ai); either way, you will be consumed completely.Revered and reviled, reptiles have slithered, glided, crawled, and climbed their way through the human imagination and into prominent places in many cultures and belief systems around the world. Ka Po‘e Mo‘o Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities explores the fearsome and fascinating creatures known as mo‘o that embody the life-giving and death-dealing properties of water. Mo‘o are not ocean-dwellers; instead, they live primarily in or near bodies of freshwater. They vary greatly in size, appearing as tall as a mountain or as tiny as a house gecko, and many possess alternate forms. Moʻo are predominantly female, and the female moʻo that masquerade as humans are often described as stunningly beautiful.During an earlier period in Hawaiian history, mo‘o akua held distinctive roles and filled a variety of functions in overlapping familial, societal, economic, political sectors. Religion, people’s belief in mo‘o akua, was the foundation upon which these roles and functions were established. Marie Alohalani Brown’s extensive research in Hawaiian-language archives has recovered knowledge about more than three hundred moʻo. In addition to being a comprehensive treatise on moʻo akua, this work includes a detailed catalog of 288 individual mo‘o with source citations. It makes major contributions to the politics and poetics of reconstructing ʻike kupuna (ancestral knowledge), Hawaiian aesthetics, the nature of tradition, the study and appreciation of moʻolelo and kaʻao (hi/stories), genre analysis and metadiscursive practices, and methodologies for conducting research in Hawaiian-language newspapers. An extensive introduction also offers readers context for understanding how these uniquely Hawaiian deities relate to other reptilian entities in Polynesia and around the world. Accessibly written about a captivating subject, this extraordinary monograph is the result of over two decades of dedicated study.

An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiākea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling. Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that arenot confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moʻolelo kamahaʻo and moʻolelo āiwaiwa, Sāmoan fāgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is whatinspires and enables the fantastic to flourish.As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moʻolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling.In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiʻi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.