Historically, the perspective assumed in fiction set in the Pacific written before 1970 presented Pacific peoples through European eyes in roles of spectators and objects of European desires. After the beginning of what Paul Sharrad called an "authentic" Pacific literature, the perspective shifted to one that viewed life through the eyes of Pacific peoples. For example, "Parade" by Patricia Grace can be read as a trope of the transforming power of the insider perspective. When the insider perspective is examined in postcolonial terms, it is clear that there can hardly be such a thing as an essential inside that can be homogeneously represented by all insiders. The realities of contemporary writers from the Pacific illustrate the complications in claiming privilege for Pacific voices because they are native. Fiction written in the Pacific during the 1990s exhibits its postcolonial identity through the perspectives it adopts, through innovations in language use, and through its ability to transform traditional images of society and culture into images of postcoloniality. 

Samoa has produced significant fiction that challenges the insider-outsider based perspective on life in the Pacific. Sia Figiel's recent novel about a young girl coming of age in Samoa, Where We Once Belonged (1996), clearly emanates from a postcolonial perspective. Commenting on her island context, Figiel presents a narrative voice that seems to step outside the images of Samoan society already in circulation, examine those images, and joke about their absurdity. ... 

Another relative latecomer to the writing scene in the Pacific is Alan Duff, who by anyone's accounting has received mixed response to his claim that he speaks from inside experience as a New Zealand Maori. Duff's point of view and the response his work has evoked--from both inside and outside the Pacific--focus the postcolonial issue of who shall speak with authority for those occupying the margins, for those who have been colonized and made invisible...Following publication of Once Were Warriors, Duff was often accused of being anti-Maori. He was viewed by establishment Maori as attacking the very core of Maori culture. When the University of Hawaii Press chose Warriors in 1994 for inclusion in Talanoa, its indigenous Pacific literature series, Vilsoni Hereniko, series editor, called the act of publication an honor to a lone voice because Duff had written from a politically incorrect position. He had challenged the widespread view that the Pakeha were responsible for conditions in which Maori people found themselves by depicting a hard-drinking, wife-beating Maori father, Jake Heke, in a way that seemed to imply that Maori themselves were largely responsible for ruined Maori lives....

These recent works of fiction from the Pacific, and others collected and published in Manoa (1993; 1997) and in Wasafiri (1997) extend the boundaries of a postcolonial form that began to emerge in works written in the 1970s by Wendt, Ihimaera, Grace, and Hulme. Recent works by Duff, Figiel, Ihimaera, and Pule raise modern issues of contested identities, social constructions of reality, and arguments about who is empowered to speak for peoples living in the new Pacific. To continue the discourse is to continue to construct new realities and to promote "other" access to power by celebrating difference.