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

Chris Thomas’s Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts offers a fresh take on, and new corpus for, ongoing discussions about nineteenth-century travelogues about Oceania. In four chapters, the scholar moves beyond the usual suspects—Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London—and features hitherto neglected travelers and writers: he analyzes four in detail but mentions close to fifty others for context and comparison. Thomas’s original theoretical contribution is that these travelers, together, create in their narratives the trope of “escaping the colonial Pacific,” (and the beaten track), “in favor of something purer and more authentic” (7). To trace and, eventually, problematize this authenticity trope, Thomas chooses for each featured writer one Pacific “cultural marker” (3): the Tongan tattoo for George Vasan (chapter 1), the Hawaiian hula for A Häolé (chapter 2), and the Fijian cannibal fork for Constance Gordon-Cumming (chapter 3). The pattern that emerges here is a “sincere” desire to understand various Oceanian islands’ unique cultural identities while, at the same time, “writing over them” to generate “a Western version of Pacific authenticity” (4). Gordon-Cumming’s chapter and the cannibal fork exemplify perhaps most clearly how a fork can be at the same time legible and exotic to readers at home—it “dwells” in a different context in Fiji—and be as much myth and discourse as actuality (76). While this conclusion may not be surprising or novel in itself, it is Thomas’s insightful analyses of the narrative ways in which the travelers’ accounts of these cultural markers work and help, challenge, or unsettle respective expectations about an “authentic” otherness that render his book particularly engaging.

The fourth chapter, on Stevenson’s Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) photographs, stands a little apart. It not only deals with a canonical author—albeit with hitherto unpublished photographs from the 600-piece-strong Edinburgh archive—but it also argues that the Western visual medium, in fact, enabled this traveler/writer to transcend the notion of South Seas authenticity and freed him from the clichés and quests of previous writers. This final chapter, through Thomas’s skillful conceptual handling of notions of control, distance, enchantment, and collaboration in both Stevenson’s experience and his representation of the Gilbert Islands, is the most original and conceptually provocative one.

The study is clean in argument and solid in its textual and contextual analyses, offering a myriad of thought-provoking ideas. As such, I found the trope of the traveler being “agreeably disappointed,” in Edward Perkins’s words, particularly interesting and would hope to see future work on what seems another prominent travel trope (3). I also thought Thomas’s claim that (in Vason) the “encounter” continues “long after the traveler has left” suggestive as it might help us reread, with fresh eyes, Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, and even Mary Louise Pratt, who are regularly called upon to theorize travel encounters (15). I also liked the subtle distinction between Gordon-Cumming’s “descriptions” versus her “telling a story” (73). We could see this as yet another poetic trope in the travel genre, and it might help illuminate many other travelogues. The Fijian chief’s performative “cannibal talk” in this storytelling context provides an even more interesting double frame (91).

As there is much to commend in Thomas’s study, my niggles may appear petty. For instance, I would have liked to learn why Thomas rejects the “going native” trope as outdated but relies on critics and frameworks we quoted in travel and colonial discourse studies twenty years ago (17): James Buzard, James Clifford, Greg Dening, Clifford Geertz, Bronisław Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anne McClintock, Sara Mills, Renato Rosaldo, Gayatri Spivak, and, of course, Pratt. Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have, thankfully, disappeared: when will the others be outdated? Or will they ever be?

On a personal note, I...