Hard To Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering, and Modernity In California

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Musée Gauguin Tahiti: Indigenous Places, Colonial Heritage

This essay discusses the Musee Gauguin Tahiti as a problematic counterpoint for contemporary developments in Oceanic museology. Considering Gauguin's complex relationship to French colonial history, the tourism industry and Pacific Island history, the site raises a number of significant issues. It occupies an ambiguous place in the museum/cultural centre/heritage site taxonomy, and its undermining of standard museum display practices often results in obfuscation, rather than clarification, of viewer understanding of Gauguin 's artworks themselves, their art historical significance, or the artist's relationship to Pacific social history. Still, it offers a unique experience for tourist-visitors, and has the potential to include indigenous communities in its display practices, programming and management. This essay engages with emerging literature in the field of Oceanic museum studies to consider the role of this curious historical site in the contemporary, global Pacific, particularly how it might more effectively address the needs of non-tourist (especially indigenous) communities

From The South To The South Pacific, And Back Again: Global Pedagogies In A Southern Classroom

This essay explores the use of a globally-informed pedagogy as a creative methodological tool in the University classroom. My area of research, the arts of the South Pacific, can be quite unfamiliar to students in the continental United States; therefore, in my teaching I strive to forge a strong comparative relationship between the global history of the South Pacific and that of the American South. This can produce a thematic framework that draws on concepts with which the students are familiar, including histories of contact, imperialism, and exchange, and then encourages students to apply these understandings of global art production to the study of specific works of art. This essay discusses the application of this methodology in an Arts of Oceania course offered in the fall of 2004, addressing the kinds of objects presented for student inquiry, the assignments used to assess student understanding of these objects, and the students? own responses to the course. Based on the students? performance and evaluations, I have found that a globally-informed pedagogy can enable their historical and aesthetic understanding of South Pacific arts. The course materials and assignments also allowed them a space to explore their own research and creative interests, as art producers, art historians, and art educators

Picturing Pleasure: Fanny Stevenson And Beatrice Grimshaw In The Pacific Islands

This article explores the travel writings, illustrated with photographs, of Fanny Stevenson and Beatrice Grimshaw, two 'lady travelers' who visited the Pacific Islands at the turn of the twentieth century. Although little critical attention has been paid to their books, these texts are significant contributions to the comparatively small archive ofEuro-American women's narratives of travel and encounter in the Pacific Islands from this period. Their representations of the Islands are at once conventional and unusual, and analysis of their texts adds significantly to the literature on women's travel writing, especially as the Pacific Islands are an underrepresented area in this field. Rather than producing generalized exoticist representations, their discussions of class, race, gender, and colonial politics are particular to the Pacific Islands, and illustrate various moments of contact at a key transition point in Pacific colonial history. Their use of photographs also forges a strong connection between their work and a longer history of image production by Westerners in the Pacific Islands. Using colonial history as a framework for exploration of class, race, and gender politics in the Pacific Islands, this essay argues that Stevenson and Grimshaw's works suggest ways that popular audiences may have experienced the Pacific Islands through word and image publications

Facing the Pacific: Polynesia in the U.S. Imperial Imagination

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