Abstract
One may be forgiven for noting similarities between this and authors Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon’s previous collaboration, Hollywood South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), an historical account of Hollywood’s deeply mediated re-imaginings of the South Pacific region during the Second World War. Apart from the authors’ ongoing academic love-affair with the figure of actress Dorothy Lamour – whose importance in American cultural conceptions of the Pacific region, they rightly contend, cannot be understated – the comparisons end here.
The South Seas is a rich and deeply satisfying ‘prequel’ to their previous work that shifts focus from concerns of the wartime Pacific to the reception history, or rezeptionsgeschichte, of the Pacific region as a geo-imaginary construct in broadly Westernized (American, British and Australian) pre-war cultures. Brawley and Dixon contend that the cultural geography of the South Seas very much extends beyond the geographical boundaries of the Pacific region itself, and that the ‘reception history’ of the Pacific as an idea within the Western imaginary, especially in American cultural narratives, long predates the Second World War. While this is not a particularly novel idea, the strength of The South Seas lies in the ways in which the authors trace clearly for their readers the comprehensive history of Western culture’s sustained interest and commercial consumption of the Pacific region as a discursive and profitable meta-narrative. Drawing on a wealth of historical, economic, literary, cultural, musical and artistic sources, Brawley and Dixon move fluidly between what may best be described as a multiplicity of salient ‘moments’ in the historical development of the Pacific as it came to be conceived within Western culture – from the early travel literature of William Dampier and the adventures of the eponymous Robinson Crusoe, to the importance of Herman Melville’s presentation of the Marquesas Islands; from the burgeoning economic and artistic importance of San Francisco as a gateway community to the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, to British and later Australian colonial interests in the Pacific Ocean; and from the presentation of the Pacific across countless editions of National Geographic and in other anthropological works, to Hollywood’s commercialization of the Bounty mutiny and the South Seas adventure film. Particularly of note is the book’s deft and seamless approach to the different ways in which the Pacific has been appropriated as a malleable motif across a whole platform of media, and across vastly different economic and cultural periods of history (as a cultural ideology, for example, the idea of the Pacific has been utilized as a tonic to North American economic depression of the 1920s, and as an incentive to the development of Australian outdoor bath and surf culture in the early twentieth century).
Implicit in Brawley and Dixon’s argument is the question of authenticity: the book raises the longstanding and frequently troubling issue in studies of the South Seas as to whether or not early textual evidence by Pacific explorers, travel writers, and writers of fiction from the period is to be believed, and whether these various texts convey the ‘real’ Pacific, or are merely reiterating an always-already fabricated set of ideas. Indeed, the authors deliberately extend the question of authenticity to include an altogether appropriate examination of whether their own work – and the work of their academic forebears and contemporaries – is positioned to authentically develop and expand upon knowledge within the area of South Seas studies, or whether, like their many literary predecessors, they continue only to propagate oversubscribed narratives of ‘white fantasy’ concerning the ‘exotic’, eroticized Pacific. While Brawley and Dixon’s intent, here, is nobly meta-critical, the question of authenticity as it is developed in The South Seas leaves the authors open for certain criticisms concerning the parameters of the material with which they begin their study. The South Seas is strongly reliant on literary texts in advancing its central thesis. While this makes sense (for years prior to film and television, literature was the most populist and egalitarian means by which ideas and knowledge were received), what is missing is a focus on the pre-literary historical reception of the Pacific, and a sustained consideration of those historical and cultural factors through which the South Seas became textualized in the first place. For example, there is little discussion of the (reception) history of the Pacific prior to the arrival of buccaneer William Dampier, whose arrival and whose writings, the authors seem to suggest, were foundational in their chronology of the Pacific’s reception history in the West. Indeed, the authors seem to give equal weight to Dampier and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which they discuss in tandem precisely for their literary merits, whilst eliding the altogether non-literary origins of the Pacific’s reception within Western discourse, and the precise economic and political motivations of those who ‘discovered’ and introduced it to the West. While Brawley and Dixon offer up a rich panoply of non-literary examples of the historical and cultural advancement of Pacific ideation across Western tradition, they are largely uncritical of the dominant historical ‘moments’ that account for the perpetuation of this ideation, presenting instead a wide snapshot (albeit an incredibly detailed and well-researched one) of the history of significant cultural movements, events, and periods through and by which the Pacific became a Western idea. The South Seas does not quite manage to reconcile the authors’ desire for a meta-critique of historical authenticity by relying so pointedly on – and implicitly acknowledging many times over that – the reception history of the Pacific is largely the history of Western writers and authors of Robinsonade fictions writing about the Pacific. What is perhaps needed, here, is a discussion around the reasons for the cultural reception of these texts in the first place, in order to better offset the well-informed and broad reception history of the Pacific that follows throughout the rest of the book.
One is put in mind of critic Thurston Clarke, who, in his 2001 monograph on Islomania, asks us ‘[w]hich came first, the island books, or islomania?’ (p. 6); a question which draws attention to the epistemological concerns of the origins of Western knowledge on the Pacific, and one that Brawley and Dixon might have more successfully engaged with in determining the origins of the Pacific’s rezeptionsgeschichte in American and European culture. While Paul Lyons’ 2006 book, American Pacificism, affords a much more sustained reading of the non-literary reception history of the Pacific in American culture, and can be seen to more accurately to advance a socio-political framework for the cultural history of Pacificism in the United States, in particular, The South Seas is nevertheless essential reading for scholars working in the areas of Pacific Island Studies, cultural and historical studies, Island Studies, and literary, film, and cultural studies. The broad range of its source material, as well the liveliness and cohesion of its chapters, makes The South Seas, on top of its academic merit, a hugely enjoyable read.