Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Critical Perspectives on Empire) - Softcover

Smith, Vanessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521728789 ISBN 13: 9780521728782

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

About this title

Book Description

Fascinating study of the the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century explorations of the Pacific. Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that underpinned the colonial encounter from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767 through the voyages of Cook and Bligh.

About the Author

Vanessa Smith teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (1998) and co-editor of Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology 1680-1900 (2000) and Islands in History and Representation (2003).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0521728789
• ISBN 13: 9780521728782
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336