Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894 by Carla Manfredi (review)

Two years into his tour of the Pacific Islands, Robert Louis Stevenson declared, in a letter to the French author and translator Marcel Schwob, that he was "waist-deep in his big book on the South Seas: the big book on the South Seas it ought to be and shall" (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: Vol. 6, August 1887–September 1890, edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew [Yale University Press, 1995], 401). Photography was to be an essential part of it, but "the big book" never quite came to be, only posthumously published, sans photographs, as In the South Seas (1896). Carla Manfredi's Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894 captures Stevenson's initial ambition, providing a well-researched, nuanced account of Stevenson's Pacific travel and, ultimately, his and his family's settling in Samoa. While the Stevenson family's photography is the star of the archival show, Manfredi also analyzes Stevenson's unpublished manuscripts, his politically inflected and poorly received account of the contemporary Samoan Civil War A Footnote to History (1892), his discarded textual-photographic collaboration with Joseph Strong "A Samoan Scrapbook," and Fanny Stevenson's The Cruise of the Janet Nichol (1914), which, Manfredi notes, was the only published "photo-text" that came out of the Stevenson family's Pacific travels (158). But Pacific Impressions also reverses the gaze of the Stevenson party, focusing especially on "moments when Islanders influenced the outcome of a photographic event" (19). In doing so, Manfredi reads Stevenson's Pacific Islander sitters not as passive subjects but rather as active participants, an approach that allows Manfredi to produce a single-author study that does not fall into the trap of dwelling solely on that author. Instead, Stevenson's photographic endeavors become a lens through which to better understand Victorian-Oceanian relations.

This is perhaps best exemplified in the second chapter, where Manfredi reads photography in the Marquesas in relation to Western discourses of supposed cannibalism, drawing on both cotemporaneous historical accounts and more recent anthropological studies. Rather than try to tease out the veracity of these (at the very least, exaggerated) claims, Manfredi instead focuses on Marquesan Islanders' awareness of them, which led the Islanders to "reenact colonial tropes of 'savagery' as a form of counterviolence, anti-colonial resistance and intra-political gamesmanship" (30). No doubt, Manfredi argues, Stevenson's Marquesan sitters were aware of the power of the camera in this context. Manfredi illuminates this point through close reading a set of photographs featuring rival Marquesan chiefs Paaaeau and Moipu, the former highly Europeanized and the latter embodying what Stevenson frames as "savage" characteristics (49). Reading Stevenson's photographs alongside his published and archival writing, Manfredi shows how Moipu pushed back against Stevenson's staging, performing the role of the cannibal not for Stevenson but to "advertise a certain Marquesan identity and resistance to [European] collaborators like Paaaeau" (53). Where most postcolonial scholars would read these photographs as sites of colonial imposition, Manfredi convincingly reads them as sites of colonial resistance.

At the same time, Manfredi does not over-rely on interpreting colonial photography as a contested space, adeptly locating moments of productive cultural exchange. In the spirit of recent British-Oceanian scholarship such as Vanessa Smith's Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (2010), Manfredi acknowledges the significance of cross-cultural friendships. In analyzing a photograph of Stevenson's stepson and main photographic collaborator Lloyd Osbourne performatively posed and dressed as a Marquesan chief, Manfredi turns the typical postcolonial reading on its head. She observes the way that Osbourne's outfit resembles that of his friend Moipu, with whom Osbourne engaged in a Marquesan ritual of name exchange. Without this context, critics might be quick to read this as cultural appropriation or cultural cross-dressing. However, to do so, Manfredi argues, is to dismiss the value...