This article offers an analysis of recent works by New Zealand-born writers and artists of various Pacific descents. It focuses on their revision of popular and institutional representations of the diasporic Pacific community addressing the ambivalent tensions between the marginal and the marketable, which have dominated these representations in the last decades. On the one hand, these works condemn stereotypes of Pacific peoples as a burden to the New Zealand economy and a marginalised minority of inefficient, lazy or dependent people. On the other, they address more recent and complex representations of their culture as a marketable commodity and an exotic addition to New Zealand culture.

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Through an analysis of Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa’s Last Virgin in Paradise and Oscar Kightley and Simon Small’s Fresh Off the Boat, this article looks at the subversion of Pacific stereotypes prevalent in popular representations. I employ Christopher Balme’s notion of “performance genealogies” to show how the performative nature of cross-cultural encounters which determined colonial representations of Pacific peoples is employed in postcolonial theatre to condemn the pervasiveness of those images, subverting them through strategies of citation and reciprocity.

This article focuses on Scarlet Lies (2015), Scarlet Secrets (2015), and Scarlet Redemption (2019), the popular romance series by Samoan writer Lani Wendt Young. The novels deploy the recognizable chick-lit formula to narrate the predicaments and romantic adventures of a young Samoan woman in what could be defined, following Selina Tusitala Marsh, as “‘Chick Lit’ Pasifika-style” (“Aotearoa Reads”). My main argument is that Young b(l)ends the conventions of chick lit both by hybridizing some of its defining features and by repoliticizing the formula. While dealing with commonplace preoccupations of chick-lit heroines, the novels serve as effective tools for social commentary as they raise criticism toward both Samoan and western societies, reflect on the neocolonial and neoliberal structures affecting the lives of her young Samoan characters, and introduce discussions on culturally specific issues.