Remaking Pacific Pasts - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Remaking Pacific Pasts write by Diana Looser. This book was released on 2014-10-31. Remaking Pacific Pasts available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms—including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song—scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, Remaking Pacific Pasts offers the first full-length comparative study of this dynamic and expanding body of work. It introduces readers to the field with an overview of significant works produced throughout the region over the past fifty years, including plays in English and in French, as well as in local vernaculars and lingua francas. The discussion traces the circumstances that have given rise to a particular modern dramatic tradition in each site and also charts routes of theatrical circulation and shared artistic influences that have woven connections beyond national borders. This broad survey contextualizes the more detailed case studies that follow, which focus on how Pacific dramatists, actors, and directors have used theatrical performance to critically engage the Pacific’s colonial and postcolonial histories. Chapters provide close readings of selected plays from Hawai‘i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia/Kanaky, and Fiji that treat events, figures, and legacies of the region’s turbulent past: Captain Cook’s encounters, the New Zealand Wars, missionary contact, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Fiji coups. The book explores how, in their remembering and retelling of these pasts, theater artists have interrogated and revised repressive and marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through Western colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and have opened up new spaces for alternative historical narratives and ways of knowing. In so doing, these works address key issues of identity, genealogy, representation, political parity, and social unity, encouraging their audiences to consider new possibilities for present and future action. This study emphasizes the contribution of artistic production to social and political life in the contemporary Pacific, demonstrating how local play production has worked to facilitate processes of creative nation building and the construction of modern regional imaginaries. Remaking Pacific Pasts makes valuable contributions to Pacific literature, world theater history, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies. The book opens up to comparative critical discussion a geopolitical region that has received little attention from theater and performance scholars, extending our understanding of the form and function of theater in different cultural contexts. It enriches existing discussions in postcolonial studies about the decolonizing potential of literary and artistic endeavors, and it suggests how theater might function as a mode of historical enquiry and debate, adding to discussions about ways in which Pacific histories might be developed, challenged, or recalibrated. Consequently, the book stimulates new discussions in Pacific studies where theater has, to date, suffered from a lack of critical exposure. Carefully researched and original in its approach, Remaking Pacific Pasts will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students in theater and performance studies and Pacific Islands studies; it will also be of interest to cultural historians and to specialists in cultural studies and postcolonial studies.
Remaking Pacific Pasts
Remaking Pacific Pasts - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Remaking Pacific Pasts write by Associate Professor Diana Looser. This book was released on 2023-12-31. Remaking Pacific Pasts available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms--including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song--scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, Remaking Pacific Pasts offers the first full-length comparative study of this dynamic and expanding body of work. It introduces readers to the field with an overview of significant works produced throughout the region over the past fifty years, including plays in English and in French, as well as in local vernaculars and lingua francas. The discussion traces the circumstances that have given rise to a particular modern dramatic tradition in each site and also charts routes of theatrical circulation and shared artistic influences that have woven connections beyond national borders. This broad survey contextualizes the more detailed case studies that follow, which focus on how Pacific dramatists, actors, and directors have used theatrical performance to critically engage the Pacific's colonial and postcolonial histories. Chapters provide close readings of selected plays from Hawai'i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia/Kanaky, and Fiji that treat events, figures, and legacies of the region's turbulent past: Captain Cook's encounters, the New Zealand Wars, missionary contact, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Fiji coups. The book explores how, in their remembering and retelling of these pasts, theater artists have interrogated and revised repressive and marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through Western colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and have opened up new spaces for alternative historical narratives and ways of knowing. In so doing, these works address key issues of identity, genealogy, representation, political parity, and social unity, encouraging their audiences to consider new possibilities for present and future action. This study emphasizes the contribution of artistic production to social and political life in the contemporary Pacific, demonstrating how local play production has worked to facilitate processes of creative nation building and the construction of modern regional imaginaries. Remaking Pacific Pasts makes valuable contributions to Pacific literature, world theater history, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies. The book opens up to comparative critical discussion a geopolitical region that has received little attention from theater and performance scholars, extending our understanding of the form and function of theater in different cultural contexts. It enriches existing discussions in postcolonial studies about the decolonizing potential of literary and artistic endeavors, and it suggests how theater might function as a mode of historical enquiry and debate, adding to discussions about ways in which Pacific histories might be developed, challenged, or recalibrated. Consequently, the book stimulates new discussions in Pacific studies where theater has, to date, suffered from a lack of critical exposure. Carefully researched and original in its approach, Remaking Pacific Pasts will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students in theater and performance studies and Pacific Islands studies; it will also be of interest to cultural historians and to specialists in cultural studies and postcolonial studies.
Remembrance of Pacific Pasts
Remembrance of Pacific Pasts - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Remembrance of Pacific Pasts write by Robert Borofsky. This book was released on 2020-02-29. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How does one describe the Pacific's pasts? The easy confidence historians once had in writing about the region has disappeared in the turmoil surrounding today's politics of representation. Earlier narratives that focused on what happened when are now accused of encouraging myths of progress. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts takes a different course. It acknowledges history's multiplicity and selectivity, its inability to represent the past in its entirety "as it really was" and instead offers points of reference for thinking with and about the region's pasts. It encourages readers to participate in the historical process by constructing alternative histories that draw on the volume's chapters. The book's thirty-four contributions, written by a range of authors spanning a variety of styles and disciplines, are organized into four sections. The first presents frames of reference for analyzing the problems, poetics, and politics involved in addressing the region's pasts today. The second considers early Islander-Western contact focusing on how each side sought to physically and symbolically control the other. The third deals with the colonial dynamics of the region: the "tensions of empire" that permeated imperial rule in the Pacific. The fourth explores the region's postcolonial politics through a discussion of the varied ways independence and dependence overlap today. Remembrance of Pacific Pasts includes many of the region's most distinguished authors such as Albert Wendt, Greg Dening, Epeli Hau'ofa, Marshall Sahlins, Patricia Grace, and Nicholas Thomas. In addition, it features chapters by well-known writers from outside Pacific Studies -- Edward Said, James Clifford, Richard White,and Gyan Prakash -- which help place the region's dynamics in comparative perspective. By moving Pacific history beyond traditional, empirical narratives to new ways for conversing about history, by drawing on current debates surrounding the politics of representation to offer different ways for thinking about the region's pasts, this work has relevance for students and scholars of history, anthropology, and cultural studies both within and beyond the region.
Remaking Pacific Pasts
Remaking Pacific Pasts - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Remaking Pacific Pasts write by Diana Mary Florence Looser. This book was released on 2009. Remaking Pacific Pasts available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This dissertation explores selected plays from Hawai'i, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Fiji that critically engage aspects of colonial and postcolonial Pacific histories. This historiographic drama, produced primarily by indigenous and diasporic playwrights, forms part of a broader theatrical genre that has flourished throughout Oceania since the late 1960s and is coeval with a phase of significant social change in the region, with the decolonization and independence of many Pacific Island nations, as well as changing responses to globalization, and increased migratory and diasporic movements within and beyond the area. Drawing upon discussions in theatre and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, I examine contemporary historiographic theatre in Oceania as a varied syncretic form that draws from and negotiates between Western and Oceanic frameworks, foregrounding heterogeneity and debate. I read this body of work as a consciously critical genre that contributes to the project of "decentering" the practice of history in Oceania (Hanlon) by interrogating and revising repressive or marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and by providing outlets for the expression of counter-discursive Pacific histories. In so doing, these plays function as tools to help define the present Oceania, facilitating processes of creative nationbuilding and the construction of modern regional imaginaries. The chapters are structured around certain moments in the Pacific's colonial and postcolonial history that have affected and helped to shape the region more broadly, without being the story of one particular nation. Chapter Two examines early cross-cultural encounters between European voyagers and Pacific peoples, focusing on contemporary plays from Hawai'i and New Zealand that revisit the voyages and concomitant legacies of the British explorer, Captain James Cook. Chapter Three explores the impact of colonial conflict through Māori plays about the New Zealand Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter Four moves away from the indigene/white settler relationship to investigate theatrical responses to recent and ongoing conflicts in a multicultural, post-independence Pacific context in which repressive social structures are occasioned by a dominant indigenous nationalism, treating plays that engage the event and aftermath of the 1987 Fiji Coup. (Abstract).
Remaking Micronesia
Remaking Micronesia - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Remaking Micronesia write by David L. Hanlon. This book was released on 1998-03-01. Remaking Micronesia available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. America's efforts at economic development in the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands proved to be about transforming in dramatic fashion people who occupied real estate deemed vital to American strategic concerns. Called "Micronesians," these island people were regarded as other, and their otherness came to be seen as incompatible with American interests. And so, underneath the liberal rhetoric that surrounded arguments, proposals, and programs for economic development was a deeper purpose. America's domination would be sustained by the remaking of these islands into places that had the look, feel, sound, speed, smell, and taste of America - had the many and varied plans actually succeeded. However, the gap between intent and effect holds a rich and deeply entangled history. Remaking Micronesia stands as an important, imaginative, much needed contribution to the study of Micronesia, American policy in the Pacific, and the larger debate about development. It will be an important source of insight and critique for scholars and students working at the intersection of history, culture, and power in the Pacific.
