Category: Pacific

Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges

Posted on by UH Press

The latest title in the series Perspectives on the Global Past looks at:

Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen

Book coverThe world’s seas and oceans have played roles of great significance in world history, serving variously as highways of trade, routes of migrations, lifelines of empires, spawning grounds of creole cultures, and venues of opportunity for pirates and smugglers. Yet historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3027-4 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination

Posted on by UH Press

The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west—connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, self-renewal away from urbanized modern life.

Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination, by Jeffrey Geiger, is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States’ intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad.

“An elegant, incisive account of the early 20th century fascination with ‘Polynesianess.’ Through readings of the lives, interactions, and cultural productions of a group of influential ‘ethnographic’ writers and film makers—whose refiguring of South Seas myths registered anxieties about modernity—Geiger appreciates complexities within an emergent, distinctively modernist, U.S. imperial imagination. Meticulously researched, and lucid in its applications of film, postcolonial, and gender theories, Geiger’s book is at once the most thorough account of its subject to date and the most theoretically rewarding.” —Paul Lyons, author of American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3066-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand

Posted on by UH Press

Christianity and Islam are not the only universalist religions spreading to all corners of the earth. So is Buddhism. The latest volume in the Topics in Contemporary Buddhism series looks at how a global religion goes local in New Zealand.

Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand is the first book-length ethnography to address the role of material culture in contemporary adaptations of Buddhism and the first to focus on convert Buddhists in New Zealand. Author Sally McAra takes as her subject a fascinating instance of an ongoing creative process whereby a global religion is made locally meaningful through the construction of a Buddhist sacred place. She uses an in-depth case study of a small religious structure, a stupa, in rural New Zealand to explore larger issues related to the contemporary surge in interest in Buddhism and religious globalization. Her research extends beyond the level of public discourse on Buddhism to investigate narratives of members of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) about their relationship with the land, analyzing these and the FWBO’s transformative project through a thematic focus on key symbolic landmarks at their site, Sudarshanaloka.
April 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-2996-4 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

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