Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination

Description

The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west--connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, renewal from urbanized modern life. Facing the Pacific is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States' intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad. Jeffrey Geiger looks at a variety of texts that helped to invent a vision of Polynesia for U.S. audiences, focusing on a group of writers and filmmakers whose mutual fascination with the South Pacific drew them together--and would eventually drive some of them apart. Each had a lasting impact on U.S. conceptions of the Pacific during the 1920s and early 1930s. This period of dramatic economic recovery, boom, and downfall also witnessed a crisis in American subjectivity, when the U.S. was preoccupied with rapidly shifting notions of race, gender, and national belonging.Key figures discussed in this volume are Frederick O'Brien, author of the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas; filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, who collaborated on Moana; director W. S. Van Dyke, who worked with Robert Flaherty on MGM's adaptation of White Shadows; and Expressionist director F. W. Murnau, whose last film, Tabu, was co-directed with Flaherty. Although these texts can be seen as participating in the long tradition of western mythmaking about Polynesia, Geiger builds on the premise that even texts embedded in imperial discourses can be seen as multifaceted and unstable, and often reveal the complex and self-divided processes of empire building.Combining original analyses with a solid grasp of relevant scholarship, Geiger examines the content and contexts of these works, taking into account U.S. expansionist ideologies and renewed frontier anxieties of the 1920s, the rise of cultural anthropology and relativism, and the uncertainties that haunted a collective sense of modern American identity and nationhood. Ultimately, these readings suggest that visions of Polynesia can help to expose the contradictions and ambivalences at the core of U.S. imperialist imaginings.