| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Rod Edmond. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 307. $59.95.

This is, in many ways, a very fine book. Clearly written, effectively organized, and thematically consistent, Rod Edmond's text examines the ways in which the Pacific Islands were represented by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers, and artists in the period from 1767 to 1914. Edmond's ultimate purpose is to argue for the historicization of contemporary colonial discourse theory. Many critical theorists assume the character of colonialism in the Pacific to have been monolithic. In their rush to explain the establishment of Western hegemony, these distant critics have tended to view the region as a single, simple, and peripheral theater for the play of global capitalism. The histories of cross-cultural encounters and engagements with colonialism are more complicated than this, however. 1

In examining Western depictions of the islands for the period under study, Edmond discovers complications, ruptures, and insights hitherto unnoticed, neglected, or ignored. Herman Melville's Typee (1846), for example, is far more than a highly romanticized account of beachcombing in the Marquesas Islands. In exploring the limits to outsiders' crossings of Pacific beaches, Melville's narrative exposes and dispels its own motivating romanticism. Missionary writings can be read as something other than evangelical propaganda. Edmond finds in William Ellis's Polynesian Researches (1829) a valuable text that does more than essentialize or denigrate its native subjects. What is ultimately revealed in this and other more private missionary manuscripts is the authors' unsettling recognition of the relativity of their own cultural norms and values. . . .

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