From Romance to Reality: Images of Pacific Islanders Across Time and Space

Abstract

Beginning with Bougainville's and Cook's accounts of their voyages to the South Pacific, westerners have been beguiled by a plethora of images, exotic, erotic, and otherwise, that western explorers, traders, travelers, and missionaries created depicting the people and places they encountered as they traversed the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. From the pioneering work of the Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, in his European Vision and the South Pacific 1768 - 1850 (1960) and Imagining the
Pacific (1992), who first argued that westerners' representations of the Pacific world they encountered were a blend of romanticism and science (Beilharz 1997,75) to the impact of globalization on contemporary Pacific art and literature (Hereniko et al. 1999; Deloughrey 2007; Brunt 2012), both western representations of Pacific peoples and places and Pacific Islanders representations of themselves are the result of these different cultures' entanglements with one another over time. Yet we continue to see permutations sometimes strikingly ingenious and original (Brunt 2012) but just as often "retreads" of tired tropes and cultural cliches. What accounts for the staying power of these hackneyed images? The authors in this issue present various
explanations, ranging from the power of the commodification of culture tothe hegemonic morality of western mass media (Lipset; Pigliasco; Pearson). For today's generation of students for whom social media produce constantly new intersections of the visual and the verbal, the articles in this issue illuminate the historical significance ofrepresentations that still circulate in various media today - and their contemporary complexities.