Special Session- Visual Histories in and of Polynesia

Visual Histories in and of Polynesia
Thursday, February 11, 5:30-7:00pm
Grand CD South, Gold Level, East Tower, Hyatt Regency

Since the late eighteenth century, “Polynesia” has been imaged as object of scientific study, colonial possession, religious conversion, erotic fantasy, and pleasurable destination.  Focusing on Aotearoa/New Zealand and Hawai‘i from the mid-nineteenth to century to World War II, this session examines visual constructions of Polynesian bodies and places through collection and representation in museums and world fairs, as well as photographs and engravings generated through missionary, settler, and traveler encounters.  Three papers analyze European and American expectations and interpretations of these images and one paper explores indigenous response to, and engagement with, the classification, exhibition, and representation of Polynesia.

ABSTRACTS:
Civilizing Images: Violence and the Visual Interpellation of Maori Women
Dr. Michelle Erai, UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Women’s Studies, University of California, Riverside

The history of violence against Maori women is embedded within the process of colonization and oppression based on the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality.  In Aotearoa/New Zealand violence took multiple forms including war and land alienation;  within more intimate settings acts committed injured the bodies, minds and social and material lives of victims.  Maori, missionaries and settlers recorded some of the violence they perceived.  Images from archives of their unpublished anecdotal materials reveal a discursive construction of Maori women as likely victims of violence as mundane and spectacular, familiar and invisible.  My research draws on postcolonial, feminist, postmodern and visual cultural critiques to build a strategic reading of images, not as evidence of violence as such, but as evidence of discourses about violence. The images demonstrate fantasies and anxieties about racial classification, travel, sex, land, nation and encounters with indigenous bodies in the expanding cartographies of empire.

Polynesia on the Potomac: Maori Art at the National Museum of Natural History
Jennifer Wagelie, Program Administrator for Internships and Fellowships, Department of Academic Programs, National Gallery of Art

This paper provides a brief overview of the collection and display of Maori art at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The collection is partially composed of objects originally on display at American world’s fairs, donations made by military personnel who were stationed in the Pacific, as well objects collected on several scientific expeditions to the area. The most notable of these acquisitions were the objects collected on the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842). Many of them were put on display as early as 1855 and by the late 19th century, the Smithsonian Institution began to use manikins in their displays of Pacific people. Looking closely at the history of Maori art at the National Museum of Natural History, this paper serves as a case study focusing on what happens to non-Western objects when they are collected and displayed in American museums.

Hawai’i and the World Fairs, 1867-1893
Stacy L. Kamehiro, History of Art and Visual Culture Dept., University of California, Santa Cruz

While significant scholarship has been devoted to the politics and poetics of Western displays in world fairs, and how these formalized national ambitions and ordered the world through racialized images of social and cultural hierarchies, little historical research attends to indigenous self-representations in international exhibitions. As Native Hawaiians constructed exhibitions during the latter half of the nineteenth century, their conceptions of culture, history and science engaged Euro-American (inter)nationalist discourses, and they wielded collections and displays to resist Western characterizations of non-Western cultures.  Through deliberate self-collection and display, Native Hawaiians responded to being presented as curiosities, specimens, possessions, and resources while fashioning their own modernities. This paper examines how objects acquired cultural meaning and political currency and, through the agency of Native Hawaiian rulers and chiefs, their role in responding to social crises and promoting Hawaiian national and cultural identities.

In Her Shadow: Exploring Representations of Hula Girls in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Dr. Caroline Vercoe, Art History Department, University of Auckland

This paper considers the role and function of representations of hula girls in Hawai‘i during the 19th century and World War II. Since the 18th century, Hawai‘i has been a site of rich and often fraught intercultural contact and exchange.  By the 1820s, hundreds of whaling ships stopped in Hawai‘i for provisions and recreation. During the 1940s, an estimated one million Allied forces and associated war workers passed through Hawai‘i.  Like their 19th century predecessors, they brought the expectation of leisure and entertainment in a place that for many signified an exotic island paradise.  The ‘hula girl’ has been entrenched in the Western imagination as the culmination of exotic difference and sexualised allure.  This paper examines popular images of the ‘hula girl’ taken in Hawai‘i and explores the way that ‘her’ highly charged signifying powers were constructed and adapted to meet the demands and expectations of her visitors.