South Seas Encounters examines several key types of encounters between the many-faceted worlds of Oceania, Britain and the United States in the formative nineteenth century. The eleven essays collected in this volume focus not only on the effect of the two powerful, industrialized colonial powers on the cultures of the Pacific, but the effect of those cultures on the Western cultural perceptions of themselves and the wider world, including understanding encounters and exchanges in ways which do not underemphasize the agency and consequences for all participating parties. The essays also provide insights into the causes, unfolding, and consequences for both sides of a series of significant ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social encounters.
This volume makes a significant contribution to increasing scholarly interest in Oceania's place in British and American nineteenth-century cultural experiences. South Seas Encounters investigates these significant interactions and how they changed the ways that Oceanic, British, and American cultures reflected on themselves and their place in the wider world.
Author(s): Richard Fulton; Peter Hoffenberg; Stephen Hancock; Allison Paynter
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 268
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
PART I: Ethnographic Encounters
1 “The natives have a decided feeling for form”: Oceania, “Primitive Art,” and the Illusion of Simplicity
2 Poisoned Arrows and Poisoned Ethnographies from Victorian Melanesia
PART II: Hawai`i and the British Empire
3 A Meeting of “Sister Sovereigns”: Hawaiian Royalty at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee
4 At Home with the Victorians? The Kingdom of Hawai`i at the International Fisheries Exhibition, London, 1883
5 Robert Louis Stevenson’s Grass Hut in Hawai`i
6 Lad O’ Pairts in Paradise: A Scottish Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of Hawai`i
PART III: Hawai`i and the American Republic
7 Ernest Hogan’s Colored All-Stars Minstrel Show: A Case of Racial Discrimination in the Republic of Hawai`i
8 Empire and Education in Hampton’s Southern Workman: The South Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Reconstruction South
PART IV: Science Encounters
9 The Malay Archipelago and the Poetics of Nature
10 Constance Gordon-Cumming and the Disappointing Volcano: Victorian Conceptions of Kīlauea
11 Nineteenth-Century Cultural and Geohistorical Interpretations of Kīlauea
Contributors
Index
