front cover of Pacific Possessions
Pacific Possessions
The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts
Chris J. Thomas
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Reframes Polynesia and Melanesia through analysis of nineteenth-century travel writing
 
In Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, Chris J. Thomas expands the literary canon on Polynesia and Melanesia beyond the giants, such as Herman Melville and Jack London, to include travel narratives by British and American visitors. These accounts were widely read and reviewed when they first appeared but have largely been ignored by scholars. For the first time, Thomas defines these writings as a significant literary genre.
 
Recovering these works allows us to reconceive of nineteenth-century Oceania as a vibrant hub of cultural interchange. Pacific Possessions recaptures the polyphony of voices that enlivened this space through the writing of these travelers, while also paying attention to their Oceanian interlocutors. Each chapter centers on a Pacific cultural marker, what Thomas refers to as each writer’s “possession”: the Tongan tattoo, the Hawaiian hula, the Fijian cannibal fork, and  Robert Louis Stevenson’s cache of South Seas photographs.
 
Thomas analyzes how westerners formed narratives around these objects and what those objects meant within nineteenth-century Oceanian cultures. He argues that the accounts served to shape a version of Oceanian authenticity that persists today. The profiled traveler-writers had complex experiences, at times promoting exoticized exaggerations of so-called authentic Polynesian and Melanesian cultures and at other times genuinely engaging in cultural exchange. However, their views were ultimately compromised by a western lens. In Thomas’s words, “the authenticity is at once celebrated and written over.”
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The Shark God
Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific
Charles Montgomery
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When Charles Montgomery was ten years old, he stumbled upon the memoirs of his great-grandfather, a seafaring missionary in the South Pacific. Twenty years later and a century after that journey, entranced by the world of black magic and savagery the bishop described, Montgomery set out for Melanesia in search of the very spirits and myths his great-grandfather had sought to destroy.  In The Shark God, he retraces his ancestor’s path through the far-flung islands, exploring the bond between faith and magic, the eerie persistence of the spirit world, and the heavy footprints of the British Empire.

In the South Pacific, he discovers a world of sorcery and shark worship, where Christian and pagan rituals coexist and an ordinary day is marked by confrontations with America-worshiping cult leaders and militants alike. A defiantly original blend of history and memoir, anthropology and travel writing, The Shark God is ultimately a tale of personal and political transformation.
 
The Shark God, a travel story as dark and twisted as one might ever wish to hear . . . reaches a superb climax with some apocalyptically page-turning scenes.”—Guardian
 
“A fascinating account of the drama of Melanesian life.”—Times Literary Supplement
 
“With exquisite writing, Montgomery lovingly captures the beauty and the horrors, the mysteries and the shams of the people and places he visits.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“A very real and memorable talent. . . . The endurance [Montgomery] displayed on his travels was admirable, the adventures he survived were tremendous, and the quality of his prose seems matched only by the wisdom of his observations.”—Simon Winchester, Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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Touring the Screen
Tourism and New Zealand Film Geographies
Alfio Leotta
Intellect Books, 2011

Following the success of prominent feature films shot on location, including Tolkien’s wildly popular The Lord of the Rings, New Zealand boasts an impressive film tourism industry. This book examines the relationship between New Zealand’s cinematic representation—as both a vast expanse of natural beauty and a magical world of fantasy on screen—and its tourism imagery, including the ways in which savvy local tourism boards have in recent decades used the country’s film representations to sell New Zealand as a premiere travel destination. Focusing on the films that have had a strong impact on marketing strategies by local tourist boards, Touring the Screen will be of interest to all those working and studying in the fields of cinema, postcolonial history, and tourism studies.

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Trees of New Guinea
Edited by Timothy M. A. Utteridge and Laura V. S. Jennings
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2021
A botanical companion to the world’s most floristically diverse island: New Guinea.
 
New Guinea is the most floristically diverse island in the world, home to nearly 5,000 tree species alone. Trees of New Guinea details each of the 693 plant genera with arborescent members found in New Guinea, covering the entire region including the West Papua and Papua Provinces of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the surrounding islands such as New Britain, New Ireland, and Bougainville. The book follows contemporary classifications and is richly illustrated with line drawings and color photographs throughout. Each group has a family description and key to the New Guinea tree genera, followed by a description of each genus, with notes on taxonomy, distribution, ecology, and diagnostic characters. Trees of New Guinea—winner of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Literature’s 2022 Award for Excellence in Botany—is an essential companion for anyone studying or working in the region, including botanists, conservation workers, ecologists, and zoologists.
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Waltzing the Magpies
A Year in Australia
Sam Pickering
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Sam Pickering:

"The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble."
---The New York Times Book Review


"Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend."
---Smithsonian

"What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering!"
---The Chattanooga Times

"Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived."
---Kirkus Reviews


The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under.

On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough.

Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.
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