Pacific literatures in French are little known. In French scholarship, as in French libraries and bookshops, this region of the world has tended to be tacked on to Asia (a category also referred to as Asia-Pacific) in a concession to what is largely absent or imagined as vast and empty. The colonial fracture of the Pacific region into French-speaking and English-speaking countries has continued into the present with the result that the literatures of the French-speaking Pacific that include the indigenous and settler literatures of New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and the now independent Vanuatu have also been virtually unstudied in the English-speaking world. Neither Wallis and Futuna nor Vanuatu has yet produced a significant body of written texts. There is growing attention being paid to French Polynesian/Tahitian writing in France (Tahiti is often used as a synecdoche for all of the Society Islands, if not for all of French Polynesia). This study focuses on the effects of contact between cultural groups of very different origins and traditions in the Pacific most particularly as these are mirrored in the emerging literatures of New Caledonia. (Emerging literature, a justifiably contested term, is used here to designate a body of texts that has its own history and roots but is only now becoming visible and competitive with literatures from Europe.) No group within the New Caledonian population of around a quarter of a million has a clear majority. Approximately 44 per cent is Melanesian, 34 per cent of European descent, 15 per cent Wallisian/ Polynesian, and 5 per cent Vietnamese and Indonesian. The singular character and intellectual interest of the many emerging literatures of this group of islands and the very particular light New Caledonia's diverse populations shed on contemporary theories of contact, on hybridity theory in particular, motivates the focus on this part of the Pacific.

New Caledonia, like French Polynesia, is one of the last Pacific countries to be struggling with issues of attaining (or rejecting) political independence.