1st Edition

South Seas Encounters Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America

    268 Pages
    by Routledge

    268 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Table of Contents



    Introduction



    List of Illustrations



    Part One: Ethnographic Encounters



    Chapter One: "The Natives Have a Decided Feeling for Form:" A. C. Haddon, the Torres Strait(s) Expedition, and the Question of Primitive Art



    Amy Woodson-Boulton, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles



    Chapter Two: Macabre Encounters: Poisoned Arrows and Poisoned Ethnographies from Victorian Melanesia



    Jane Samson, University of Alberta



    Part Two: Hawai`i and the British Empire



    Chapter Three: A Meeting of "Sister Sovereigns:" Hawaiian Royalty at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee



    Lindsay Puawehiwa Wilhelm, University of California, Los Angeles



    Chapter Four: At Home with the Victorians? The Kingdom of Hawai`i at the London Fisheries Exhibition, 1883



    Peter H. Hoffenberg, University of Hawai`i, Manoa



    Chapter Five: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Grass Hut in Hawai`i



    Richard J. Hill, Chaminade University



    Chapter Six: Lad O’ Pairts in Paradise: A Scottish Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of Hawai`i



    Bud (Duane) Clark, University of Hawai`i, Maui College



    Part Three: Hawai`i and the American Republic



    Chapter Seven: Ernest Hogan’s Colored All-Stars Minstrel Show: A case of racial discrimination in the Republic of Hawai`i



    Allison Paynter, Chaminade University



    Chapter Eight: Emancipation, Education and Hampton’s Southern Workman: Hawai’i, the Reconstruction South and Indian Territory



    Teresa Zackodnik, University of Alberta



    Part Four: Science Encounters



    Chapter Nine: The Malay Archipelago and the Poetics of Nature



    Alexis Harley, La Trobe University



    Chapter Ten: Constance Gordon-Cumming and the Boring Volcano: Victorian Conceptions of Kilauea



    Kent Linthicum, Oklahoma State University



    Chapter Eleven: Nineteenth-Century Cultural and Geohistorical Interpretations of Kilauea



    Philip K. Wilson, Retired History Department Chair, Current Bookstore Proprietor



    Brief Biographies of Contributors



    Index

    Biography

    Richard Fulton earned his Ph.D. in English from Washington State University in 1975; his dissertation focused on periodical criticism of poetry in the 1870s. He is now a retired Academic Vice President, former President of both the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and VISAWUS, former editor of VPR, and continuing Victorian scholar working on Victorian childhood and the late Victorian military. He is author of some one hundred articles and reviews on Victorian Studies topics; in 2013 he collaborated with Peter Hoffenberg in editing Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where all things are possible. He is currently working on a book examining the culture of boyhood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.