Category: Polynesia

Challenges in Mental Health for Pacific Peoples

Posted on by stephchun

Penina Uliuli: Contemporary Challenges in Mental Health for Pacific Peoples, edited by Philip Culbertson, Margaret Nelson Agee, and Cabrini ‘Ofa Makasiale, is a diverse collection of essays examining important issues related to mental health among Pacific Islanders through the topics of identity, spirituality, the unconscious, mental trauma, and healing.

September 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3224-7 / $28.00 (PAPER)

“Finally, a volume on mental health and well being of Pacific Island people written from the point of view of their own world view. A rich and substantive contribution for understanding mental health issues, concepts, and interventions within the cultural context of Pacific Islander history, culture, and the emerging challenges posed by rapid social change. This is essential reading for professionals, scholars, and lay audiences seeking to understand better the complex cultural tapestry and way of life of the many different people who inhabit the vast area of the Pacific Ocean and its countless islands.” —Anthony J. Marsella, Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawai‘i

U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the Pacific

Posted on by stephchun

Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century.

The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War, by Gerald Horne, ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of “blackbirding” (slave trading) in the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations.

“Horne’s book is impressive in its research and compelling in its history and argument. It pieces together a marvelously suggestive story of the African American presence in the Pacific. . . .This is transnational history at its most ambitious and materially grounded best and includes superb comparative insights.” —David Roediger, Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History, University of Illinois

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3147-9 / $29.00 (PAPER)

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)

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