The work of Russell Soaba

Russell Soaba is a major writer from Papua New Guinea whose work has been neglected because of its perceived 'difficulty'. This dissertation seeks to review this assessment in the light of postcolonial literary theory models of marginality. When Soaba's writing is seen in its historical and cultural context, his complexity can be explained as arising firstly from the modernisation of the artist's role under decolonisation in a still largely traditional-oral culture, and secondly, from a regional marginalisation within the emergent national frame that complicates the binary centre-margin structure of postcolonial theory.