Smith's scrutiny of the pictorial and documentary evidence results in some surprising findings. He argues that the obligation science placed on art to provide information was a factor in the triumph of Impressionism during the late nineteenth century. He points out, for example, that William Hodges, Cook's official artist on his second voyage to the Pacific, was one of the first artists to adopt plein-air methods of painting. Describing the impact of the Pacific world on burgeoning English Romanticism, Smith tells of the crucial influence of Cook's astronomer, William Wales, on S.T. Coleridge's imaginative development. He describes how John Webber's apparently documentary art was fashioned to suit political concerns. He examines critically the relevance of Edward Said's Orientalism for our understanding of European perceptions of the Pacific

Much has been written about Papua New Guinea over the last century and too often in ways that legitimated or served colonial interests through highly pejorative and racist descriptions of Papua New Guineans. Paying special attention to early travel literature, works of fiction, and colonial reports, laws, and legislation, Regis Tove Stella reveals the complex and persistent network of discursive strategies deployed to subjugate the land and its people.

Discusses the makings of the "American Pacific" locality/location/identity as space and ground of cultural production, and the way this region can be linked to "Asia" and "Pacific" as well as to "American mainland"

How, when, and why has the Pacific been a locus for imagining different futures by those living there as well as passing through? What does that tell us about the distinctiveness or otherwise of this “sea of islands”? Foregrounding the work of leading and emerging scholars of Oceania, Pacific Futures brings together a diverse set of approaches to, and examples of, how futures are being conceived in the region and have been imagined in the past. Individual chapters engage the various and sometimes contested futures yearned for, unrealized, and even lost or forgotten, that are particular to the Pacific as a region, ocean, island network, destination, and home. Contributors recuperate the futures hoped for and dreamed up by a vast array of islanders and outlanders—from Indigenous federalists to Lutheran improvers to Cantonese small business owners—making these histories of the future visible. In so doing, the collection intervenes in debates about globalization in the Pacific—and how the region is acted on by outside forces—and postcolonial debates that emphasize the agency and resistance of Pacific peoples in the context of centuries of colonial endeavor. With a view to the effects of the “slow violence” of climate change, the volume also challenges scholars to think about the conditions of possibility for future-thinking at all in the midst of a global crisis that promises cataclysmic effects for the region. Pacific Futures highlights futures conceived in the context of a modernity coproduced by diverse Pacific peoples, taking resistance to categorization as a starting point rather than a conclusion. With its hospitable approach to thinking about history making and future thinking, one that is open to a wide range of methodological, epistemological, and political interests and commitments, the volume will encourage the writing of new histories of the Pacific and new ways of talking about history in this field, the region, and beyond.

In a time of dynamism and contradiction in Pacific cultural production, a time of 'turning things over' and 'writing from the inside out, ' this far-reaching volume provides a comprehensive set of essays and interviews on the emergent literatures of the New Pacific. With its dynamic combination of important position papers, polemics, and decolonizing critiques by noted authors and of analysis by new and established post-colonial scholars, this volume exposes 'the maze and mix of literatures and cultural identities breaking down and building up across the Pacific Ocean.' This pioneering work will be the definitive resource for anyone researching or teaching Pacific literature and will be invaluable for bringing Pacific culture to readers outside the region