Representing the South Pacific (Paperback)

Rod Edmond

ISBN 10: 0521021138 / ISBN 13: 9780521021135

Editore: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005

Paperback. 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. This book examines how the South Pacific was represented by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers, and artists between 1767 and 1914. It draws on history, literature, art history, and anthropology in its study of different, often conflicting, colonial discourses of the Pacific. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Codice articolo 9780521021135

Riassunto:

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

Recensione: 'It is extremely refreshing to encounter work that displays all the lucid, interdisciplinary bounce of cultural theory and is also carefully attentive to historical, geographical and social reality ... a lively discursive account ... in scientific literature, theatre, painting, poetry, history and the novel, in Britain, across to the US and back to the emerging nations of the Pacific ... It is a method that sustains the whole of this marvellous book ... a rich and fascinating index of Pacific images and narratives.' David Hansen, The Australian's Review of Books

'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

Dati bibliografici

Titolo: Representing the South Pacific (Paperback)
Casa editrice: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Data di pubblicazione: 2005
Legatura: Paperback
Condizione: new