The South Seas

"Before getting tickets for that Tahitian holiday you've dreamed about, read this book." Publishers Weekly

Postcolonial literature about the South Seas, or Nanyang, examines the history of Chinese migration, localization, and interethnic exchange in Southeast Asia, where Sinophone settler cultures evolved independently by adapting to their "New World" and mingling with native cultures. Writing the South Seas explains why Nanyang encounters, neglected by most literary histories, should be considered crucial to the national literatures of China and Southeast Asia.

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed. Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.

"Richard Parkinson's Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee was first published in 1907. In this 900-page work, Parkinson drew together and expanded on the scientific and popular papers he had been publishing since 1887, creating in the process a landmark ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago." "His travels covered the islands now known as New Britain, New Ireland, New Hanover, Manus, and Buka and Bougainville, but he also collected information about the mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland). His observations covered a wide range, from religious life and ceremonies to artefacts and language. It is clear he talked extensively with people - though mostly with a translator - and compared accounts. He also took many photographs, some 200 of which were included in the volume. Given the period, all his human subjects had to be posed, but the range of associated detail, probably unconsciously included, is very wide."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

IN THE SOUTH SEAS records Stevenson's travels with his wife Fanny and their family in the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilbert Islands during 1888-9. Originally drafted in journal form while Stevenson travelled, it was then ambitiously rewrittento describe the islands and islanders as well as Stevenson's own personal experiences. IN THE SOUTH SEAS was published posthumously in 1896. Its combination of personal anecdote and historical account, of autobiography and anthropology, of Stevenson and South Sea Islands, has a particular charm.

Reproduction of the original.