ENG 7083.01/5933.02 Seminar:
New Texts/New Contexts –
Literature of the Postcolonial South Pacific
Professor Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Spring 2010, UTSA
W 11:00 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
MB 1.204
Office: MB 2.460 Office Hours: MF 11:00-12:30
Office Phone: 210-458-5133 Office Fax: 210-458-5366
Email:
Web page: http://colfa.utsa.edu/English/reesman.html
Course Description:
The South Pacific has a long history of European-imposed stereotypes that have fueled colonialism, development, and tourism in part by perpetuating such notions as the “timelessness” or fixity of traditional “native” cultures, the exotic sexuality of indigenous women, and the essentially heathenistic, corrupt, and/or diseased nature of the tropics. Oceania is mapped and represented not only by those intent upon exploiting its resources but also by British and American writers beginning in the 18th century, and also by contemporary indigenous writers, often in opposition to the earlier representations. Certain South Pacific stereotypes and responses to them form a dynamic presence in many works of literature set in the South Pacific.
The first Pacific literatures in English are accounts from explorers such as Captain James Cook and his passenger Joseph Banks beginning in the 1760’s. Then follow the many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century missionary books and nineteenth-century novels of cannibals and bare-breasted maidens by such popular writers as Robert Michael Ballantyne, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, and Jack London. For Modernists, the French writer Pierre Loti’s accounts of Tahiti and Tahitian paintings and writings of Paul Gauguin further defined tropicality as the zone of the female erotic even as scientists alternatively framed the tropics as the site of disease—both these reductions of the “natives” provided openings for further exploitation by Western powers. In more recent times the Pacific has been portrayed as a colonized site as the “Blue Hawaii” of Elvis Presley, the “Bali Hai” of Rogers and Hammerstein, Disneyland’s “Tiki Room,” and in so many other incarnations.
The purpose of this course is to read and analyze South Pacific works by selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American writers against a set of texts by recent and contemporary indigenous Pacific writers from Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand in order to examine how different cultural and historical positions and diverse narrative structures and styles reveal authors’ cultural assumptions and help create their unique artistic statements.
Requirements:
One research-based original essay (15 pages). Two written exams (one of which is take-home). Three in-class reports of 15 minutes each, one a preliminary Library report on contexts for South Pacific literature, one an annotated bibliography, and one a final report on required essay. Please expect to turn in drafts of your work and receive detailed feedback—the essay will be a semester-long work-in-progress aimed at conference presentation and publication. We will spend as much time on this project as you need to make it professionally successful. Class format will be lecture, especially concentrated at the beginning; discussion; reports; films; other presentations and engagements in diverse media and formats.
Texts:
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). Ed. John Bryant.
New York: Penguin, 1996.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883). New York: New American
Library/Signet, 1998.
Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales (Oxford World’s Classics), ed. Roslyn
Jolly (Oxford)
Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (1911). Ed. R. D. Madison. New York:
Penguin, 2004.
Jack London, Stories of Hawaii. Ed. A. Grove Day. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing,
1984.
Jack London, A Son of the Sun: The Adventures of Captain David Grief (1912).
Ed. Gary Riedl and Thomas M. Tietze. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
Piilani Kaluaikoolau, The True Story of Kaluaikoolau: As Told by His Wife,
Piilani. (1906) Trans. Frances N. Frazier. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2001.
Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home (1973). Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1996.
EpeliHau'ofa, Tales of the Tikongs (1983). Ed. VilsoniHereniko.Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
Witi Tame Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (1987). New York: Harcourt Paperbacks,
2003.
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1997). New York:
Harcourt, 1997.
Syllabus:
January 13 Introduction to Course, Preliminary Library/Context Report
Assigned. Film: South Pacific (1959)
January 20 Preliminary Library/Context Reports, Lecture on Theories of
Postcolonial South Pacific, French Perspectives
January 27 Melville, Typee
Essay and Prospecti Assigned
February 3 Stevenson, Treasure Island and In the South Seas
Exam #1 Assigned
February 10 London, The Cruise of the Snark
February 17 London, Stories of Hawaii (selected stories from The House
of Pride)
Preliminary Essay Prospectus Due
February 24 London, Stories of Hawaii (selected stories from On the
Makaloa Mat); Kaluaikoolau, The True Story Kaluaikoolau
March 3 London, A Son of the Sun
Exam #1 Due
March 10 London, A Son of the Sun, con’t.
March 15-19 SPRING BREAK
March 24 Wendt, Sons for the Return Home
March 31 Hau'ofa, Tales of the Tikongs
Revised Essay Prospectus Due (including brief survey of major scholarship)
April 7 Ihimaera, The Whale Rider; film “Whale Rider”(2003)
April 14 Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
April 21 Exam #2 In Class
April 28 Essay Due, Reports on Essays
Grades:
40% Final Essay
10% Preliminary Prospectus
10% Revised Prospectus
10% Exam #1
10% Exam #2
5% Preliminary Library/Context Report
5% Annotated Bibliography Report
5% Report on Essay
5% Discussion
Please notify me in advance by email or phone if you have any problems getting these assignments in on time. Late work without excuse will be penalized.
ENG 7083 Seminar:
New Texts/New Contexts –
Literature of the Postcolonial South Pacific
Preliminary Library/Context Reports
Choose one of the subjects below, sign your name beside it, and hit the Library. You are to prepare a 15-minute (no longer!) oral report (with handouts, powerpoints, etc., if desired) for our next class meeting, January 20. The purpose of the report is to open up contexts for our study of literature of the postcolonial South Pacific. As you can see, the subjects and possible foci of the reports are quite wide-ranging and diverse in subject matter and point of view. Your report is intended to be merely an overview of sources on each subject and a very general, preliminary sense of the scope of the subject.
______“Pre-History” and Modern History of the
Hawaiian Islands
______“Pre-history” and History of the South
Pacific, Marquesas west to New Zealand and Australia
______Earliest Europeans in the Pacific
______The “Discovery” of Tahiti and its
Aftermath
______The Voyages of Captain James Cook
______Debate between scholars Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere on Captain Cook and the Hawaiians
______Anthropological Projects of Louis Agassiz and Franz Boas (including photography of indigenous peoples)
______Economic Goals of 19th- and early 20th-century Europeans and Americans in the Pacific (trading, whaling, agriculture, tourism)
______Racial Ideas about the South Pacific held by 19th- and early 20th-century Europeans and Americans
______Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and Following the Equator (1897)
______Missionaries in Hawaii
______Missionaries in the South Pacific
______International Politics Among Britain, the United States, France, and Germany in the South Pacific in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries
______World War II and Images of Tropicality brought home by U.S. servicemen
______Early Forms of Resistance to Colonization by Islanders
______Recent and Contemporary Resistance by Islanders
______Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and films based upon the book
______Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of
Oceania (1992)
Annotated Bibliography Reports:
Sign up in the space underneath your choice and provide a 15-minute oral report plus supporting materials (a required handout with 100-word summaries of each of five sources) to illustrate what you have found in research on your chosen topic. Your goal is to provide cogent critical background, insight, and research tools for your fellow classmates, as well as to acquaint yourself further with research methods and scholarship in the area of literature of the South Pacific. Topics are quite broad; to determine how to narrow your topic, please consult with me.
January 27 Herman Melville in the South Seas: The Real Story
Behind Typee
______
The History of Europeans in the Marquesas
______
February 3 Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas
______
February 10 Jack London and Class in Hawaii
______
February 17 Jack London and Race in the South Seas
______
London’s Use of Polynesian Mythology
______
February 24 Representations of the Tropics in 20th- 21st-Century
Film
______
March 3 Representations of the Tropics in American Popular
Culture Other Than Film (see: “Tiki” culture)
______
March 10: On Names: What to Call “the Pacific” and Its
Peoples? Or, “South of Where?”
______
March 24 Story-Telling Traditions within Contemporary
Literatures of Hawai’i and the South Pacific
______
March 31 The History of Tonga
______
April 7 The Whale Rider, book and film comparison
______
April 14 Contemporary Writers of Hawai’i
______
Critical Analyses of Tourism in Hawai’i
______
Final Essay Reports:
Prepare a 10-15 minute summary of the results of your research and the thesis of your essay. Solicit input from fellow students as to revision, expansion, etc., for presentation and publication. Provide a one-page outline of your paper, with a 150-word abstract for each class member.
Recommended Sources:
(you need not read all of these (!) but you may select from them for your research)
Aldrich, Robert. The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842-1940. London:
Macmillan, 1990.
Ballantyne, R. M. The Coral Island. Rpt. Bristol: Purnell Books, 1985.
Beaglehole, J. C. The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1974.
Berkove, Lawrence I. “Jack London’s ‘Second Thoughts’: The Short Fiction of His
Late Period.” In Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer. Ed. Sara S. Hodson and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. San Marino: Huntington Library Press: 2002, 60-76.
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”
and “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi.” In his The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bingham, Hiram. A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands Or
the Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands, Comprising a Particular View of the Missionary Operations Connected with the Introduction and Progress of Christianity and Civilization Among the Hawaiian People (1847). Rpt. New York: Praeger, 1969.
Blanch, Lesley. Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist. London: Collins, 1983.
Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siécle.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Brantlinger, Patrick. “’Dying Races’: Rationalizing Genocide in the Nineteenth
Century.” In The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power. Ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh. London: Zed Books, 1995.
Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World London:
HarperCollins, 1991.
Calder, Alexander, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr, eds. Voyages and Beaches:
Europe and the Pacific 1769-1840. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, . .
Campbell, Jeanne. “’Falling Stars’: Myth in ‘The Red One.’” Jack London
Newsletter 11 (May-December 1978): 87-101.
Charlot, John. “The Influence of Polynesian Literature and Thought on Robert
Louis Stevenson.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 14 (1987).
Chen, Chih-ping. Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2000.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Cole, Geert. Lonely Planet South Pacific. 2003.
Davies, John. The History of the Tahitian Mission, 1799-1830. Ed. C.W.
Newbury. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society and Cambridge University Press, 1961.
Daws, Gavin. A Dream of Islands. New York: Norton, 1980.
------. Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1973.
Day, A. Grove. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii. London: Chatto & Windus,
1967.
------. “Jack London’s Heart of Darkness.” In his Mad About Islands: Novelists
of a Vanished Pacific. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing Co., 1987, 162-72.
Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, the Marquesas,
1774-1880. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Dunmore, John. French Explorers in the Pacific. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Dyer, Richard. White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Edmond, Rod. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to
Gauguin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Ellis, Juniper. “’A Wreckage of Races’ in Jack London’s South Pacific.” Arizona
Quarterly 57, iii (2001): 57-75.
------. 'The Techniques of Storytelling': An Interview with Albert Wendt. ARIEL:
A Review of International English Literature. 28, 3: (July 1997): 79-94.
Ellis, William. Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii, or Owhyee. London: H.
Fisher, Son & P. Jackson, 1827.
------. Polynesian Researches: During a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 3 vols. London: Fisher, Son & Jackson, 1830.
Forbes, David. Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People, 1778-
1941. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press and Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1992.
Furer, Andrew. “’Zone-Conquerors’ and ‘White Devils’: The Contradictions of
Race in the Works of Jack London.” In Rereading Jack London, ed.
Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 158-71.
Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: Gauguin’s Tahiti. Ed. Nicholas Wadley. Trans.
Jonathan Griffin. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.
------. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. Trans. O.F. Theis. Rpt. New York: Dover,
1985.
------. The Intimate Journals. London: KPI, 1985.
Gell, Alfred. Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993.
Gowen, Herbert Henry. The Paradise of the Pacific (1892).
Gunson, Niel. Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas,
1797-1860. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Hamilton, David Mike. “The Tools of My Trade”: Annotated Books in Jack
London’s Library. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.
Harvey, Anne-Marie. “Sons of the Sun: Making White, Middle-Class Manhood in
Jack London’s David Grief Stories and the Saturday Evening Post.”
American Studies 39, iii (1998): 37-68.