O’Brien, Patricia (Visiting Professor, Australian National University and and Ctr. for Australian & New Zealand Studies)

The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific O’Brien, Patricia (Visiting Professor, Australian National University and and Ctr. for Australian & New Zealand Studies)

Commendation Quotes: O' Brien offers lessons that many readers will have a hard time forgetting. Most insightful is her interpretation of the sexual nature of colonial power and the dominant sexual undertones of voyaging, discovering, conquering, and colonizing. Commendation Quotes: A scintillating consideration of the classical trope of the odyssey in Pacific voyages in moulding the subjectivity of men and their perceptions of women. Her analyses of the relation between women, water, and sexual danger and the figures of sirens, nymphs and mermaids are captivating. Table of Contents: AcknowledgmentsIntroductionI. From Antiquity to Discovery of TahitiII. Colonizing Masculinities, 1767-1860III. Nature's Resources and the Forging of Empire, 1788-1890IV. Gender, Race, and the Body Politic in the Pacific and EuropeV. From the 1890s to the PresentEpilogueAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndexBiographical Note: Patty O'Brien teaches history through the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Publisher Marketing: "The Pacific Muse" offers a fresh perspective on a seductively familiar topic: the colonial stereotype of the exotic Pacific island woman. By tracing the evolution of female primitivism from Western antiquity to twentieth-century Hollywood images, the book sheds new light on our understanding of how and why this ideal has persisted and the major role it has played in the colonization of Pacific peoples. While examining colonial culture in its many manifestations, from art, literature, and film to the journals of explorers and missionaries, O'Brien rereads not only the canonical texts of Pacific imperialism, but also lesser-known remnants of this cultural heritage with an eye to what they reveal about gender, sexuality, race, and femininity. Over its long history - from the famous (and much romanticized) settlement of Tahitian women and mutineers from the Bounty on Pitcairn Island in 1789 to the South Seas romantic tradition, Gauguin, and beach culture - notions of female primitivism changed in response to the ideological watersheds of Christianity, Enlightenment science, and race theories, as well as the development of democratic nation-states, modernity, and colonialism. "The Pacific Muse" shows the continuities and differences in representing colonized women across geographical regions and historical epochs and highlights the importance of sexualization and feminization in imperial enterprises. Including 37 illustrations of Pacific women from early etchings by shipboard artists to recent photographs, this panoramic view of gendered Pacific history is enlightening reading for cultural anthropologists, women's and gender studies scholars, and historians of colonialism and the Pacific. Review Citations: Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2006 pg. 101 (EAN 9780295986098, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  O'Brien, Patty Patty O'Brien teaches history through the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.