The Word, the Pen, and the Pistol: Literature and Power in Tahiti (Suny Series on the Sublime) [Hardcover]

Robert Nicole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2000 | Series: Suny Series on the Sublime

The Word, The Pen, and the Pistol explores the relationships between history, power, knowledge, and certain cultural productions such as literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Borrowing from the theoretical works of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, the book reveals in the French colonial territory of French Polynesia the complicit relationship between imperialism and colonial texts, between the image of Tahiti as "paradise on earth" and other instruments of management, and between discourses such as the "Noble Savage" and various technologies of discipline and ordering. In particular, the book discusses the role that such men as Buffon, Rousseau, Bouganville, Loti, Gauguin, and Gobineau and institutions such as science, phrenology, scholarship, racism, travel literature, education, and tourism played in creating, supporting, authorizing, disseminating and enforcing certain images of the Polynesian. The book simultaneously details the complex and diverse responses of Maohi people to these romanticized Western discourses and reconstructs the spaces used by them to inscribe their resistance.

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About the Author

Robert Nicole is Lecturer in History/Politics at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 230 pages
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr (November 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791447391
• ISBN-13: 978-0791447390
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,680,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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