Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts by Chris J Thomas (review)

Pacific Possessions expands the nineteenth-century literary archive of British and American visitors to Oceania beyond the celebrated yet limited canon of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. Through recovering lesser-known travel writers who have often been dismissed by literary scholars for their uneven accounts, Chris J Thomas explores how Pacific cultures are imagined, narrated, and possessed by Westerners through cultural exchange and colonial imposition. These conflicting narratives about Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, Thomas argues, provide valuable insight into how Westerners searched for experiences "uncontaminated by colonial presence" in Tonga, Hawai'i, Fiji, and Kiribati (7). Thomas explicates how Westerners repeatedly failed to find their desired experiences in the Pacific and instead are forced to narrativize their own imagined interactions that simultaneously embrace and reject sensational and romanticized sentiments of the time. Pacific Possessions demonstrates how the discursive and ideological strategies employed by writers reveal the slippages between colonial exoticism and sustained engagement with Indigenous communities. Thomas's work speaks to literary studies, Pacific studies, transpacific studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies and will be generative to scholars interested in the discursive genealogies of cultural production, visual media, and the rhetoric of global encounters.

The central idea of Pacific Possessions is the creation of a genealogy of Western travel writings that reject the genre of beachcomber encounters by sailors and instead produce what Thomas identifies as the tourist narrative grounded in objective observation of Indigenous cultural practices. Building on scholarship by Paul Lyons, Greg Dening, Mary Louise Pratt, Vanessa Smith, and others, Thomas expands on the historical stakes of colonial contact and symbolic exchange through narrative. Thomas meticulously reads the paradoxical ideological and narratological strategies at work in Western travel writing in which writers sought out Pacific authenticity through definitive cultural objects that are "at once imagined as Western possession[s] while also representing the antithesis of Western society" (4). These cultural signifiers are what Thomas theorizes as "Pacific possessions," which generate a Western form of Pacific authenticity made visible in the pursuit and documenting of Oceanian cultures. Through analyzing the cultural interplay of symbolic objects such as the Tongan tattoo, the Hawaiian or Kanaka Maoli hula, the Fijian "cannibal fork" (iculanibokola), and Robert Louis Stevenson's Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) photography, Thomas argues that these venerated objects in travel writing simultaneously betray the grammatical strategies Western writers used to corroborate popular imagined Pacific experiences.

In four chapters that each analyze an individual author, Thomas traces the circulation of, and at times obsession with, symbolic objects that reveal the impossibilities for writers to escape their own desires and nostalgia for what they define as authentic precolonial South Seas culture. Chapter 1 focuses on British missionary George Vason's 1810 An Authentic Narrative of Four Years' Residence at Tongataboo, which documents his immersion into Tongan society and depicts the process of tattooing as a site that materially troubled his European identity. Tonga physically mapped itself onto Vason's body, which forced a continual cultural exchange and "a way of reencountering the beach [Tonga]" (15). This idea of Tongan tattooing as subverting authorial and European audience's expectations of Oceania is further reflected in chapter 2's examination of Kanaka Maoli hula as a symbolic and embodied practice of precolonial Hawai'i. Sandwich Island Notes, written in 1854 by "A Häolé," who was later identified as George Washington Bates, focuses on the writer's search for authentic viewing of hula in Hawai'i. This chapter identifies a change in the genre of travel writing in which authors became spectators or perhaps voyeurs as opposed to participant-observers. Bates took up the "the role of showman … and [became] the interpreter of Pacific culture" to guide the audience to witness the hula...