Representing the South Pacific
Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin

Examines representations of the South Pacific by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers, and artists, 1767–1914.

Rod Edmond (Author)

9780521550543, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 November 1997

320 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.615 kg

'A finely attuned account of the way Europeans represented the Pacific world from Cook to Gauguin … A masterly survey … A fascinating account.' Bernard Smith, Australian Book Review

This book examines how the South Pacific was represented by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers, and artists between 1767 and 1914 by drawing on history, literature, art history, and anthropology. Edmond engages with colonial texts and postcolonial theory, criticising both for their failure to acknowledge the historical specificity of colonial discourses and cultural encounters, and for continuing to see indigenous cultures in essentially passive or reactive terms. The book offers a detailed and grounded 'reading back' of these colonial discourses into the metropolitan centres which gave rise to them, while resisting the idea that all representations of other cultures are merely self-representations. Among its themes are the persistent myth-making around the figure of Cook, the western obsession with Polynesian sexuality, tattooing, cannibalism, and leprosy, and the Pacific as a theatre for adventure and as a setting for Europe's displaced fears of its own cultural extinction.

1. Introduction
2. Killing the god: the afterlife of Cook's death
3. Mutineers and beachcombers
4. Missionary endeavours
5. Trade and adventure
6. 'Taking up with kanakas': Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific
7. Skin and Bones: Jack London's diseased Pacific
8. The French Pacific
9. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]