Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin

This book examines how the South Pacific was represented by explorers, missionaries, travelers, 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. Among its themes are the persistent mythmaking around the figure of Cook, the Western obsession with Polynesian sexuality, tattooing, cannibalism and leprosy, the Pacific as a theater for adventure, and as a setting for Europe's displaced fears of its own cultural extinction.

"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

"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....It is a method that sustains the whole of this marvelous book...a rich and fascinating index of Pacific images and narratives." David Hansen, The Australian's Review of Books

"This is a provocative, powerfully written book." Jane Samson, The International History Review

"This is, in many ways, a very fine book. Clearly written, effectively organized, and thematically consistent..." David Hanlon, American Historical Review

"...provides scholars of Euro-American literature, as well as Pacific history and ethnography, with an informative survey of the ways in which Europeans articulated the aesthetics and politics of cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific. It is a pleasure to read and should generate much discussion and debate." Keith Lujan Camacho, The Historian

"In densely packed and detailed prose, Rod Edmond addresses a perceived gap between the paricularity of conventional colonial history and colonial discourse analysis, which regards colonialism as a 'unitary formation' that generalizes rather than particularizes (p.12). Edmond's analyses recontextualize key colonial moments through close readings of selected textual and visual representations by the British, American and French." Karla Saari Kitalong, Pacific Affairs

"...exemplary study...Beyond students of the Pacific, this rich and rewarding study should be of interest to those who follow colonial discourse analysis through its vicissitudes and excesses and welcome sane, historically grounded work in this too fashionable field." Comparative Literature