Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- Frontispiece
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Preface to Volume II
- Part VII Rethinking the Pacific
- 32 Climate Change, Rising Seas, and Endangered Island Nations
- 33 Authority, Identity, and Place in the Pacific Ocean and Its Hinterlands, c. 1200 to c. 2000
- 34 Europe’s Other? Academic Discourse on the Pacific as a Cultural Space
- 35 The Phantom Empire
- 36 Blue Continent to Blue Pacific
- Part VIII Approaches, Sources, and Subaltern Histories of the Modern Pacific
- Part IX Culture Contact and the Impact of Pre-colonial European Influences
- Part X The Colonial Era in the Pacific
- Part XI The Pacific Century?
- Part XII Pacific Futures
- References to Volume II
- Index
34 - Europe’s Other? Academic Discourse on the Pacific as a Cultural Space
from Part VII - Rethinking the Pacific
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2022
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- Frontispiece
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Preface to Volume II
- Part VII Rethinking the Pacific
- 32 Climate Change, Rising Seas, and Endangered Island Nations
- 33 Authority, Identity, and Place in the Pacific Ocean and Its Hinterlands, c. 1200 to c. 2000
- 34 Europe’s Other? Academic Discourse on the Pacific as a Cultural Space
- 35 The Phantom Empire
- 36 Blue Continent to Blue Pacific
- Part VIII Approaches, Sources, and Subaltern Histories of the Modern Pacific
- Part IX Culture Contact and the Impact of Pre-colonial European Influences
- Part X The Colonial Era in the Pacific
- Part XI The Pacific Century?
- Part XII Pacific Futures
- References to Volume II
- Index
Summary
Twenty-first-century gallery audiences in Italy, New Zealand, and Australia have experienced the immersive digital video work Pursuit of Venus (Infected), 2015–17, by Māori artist Lisa Reihana.1 The work both re-animates and re-stages an 1802 French wallpaper design that featured key scenes from eighteenth-century Pacific and exploration history, drawn from the voyage accounts of Captain James Cook and others (Figure 34.1). In Enlightenment salons – and afterwards in selected museums – historical audiences found themselves surrounded by tableaux of cross-cultural encounter and exchange. Curiosity, titillation, and aesthetics were combined in the wallpaper, as they are in Reihana’s video art. Viewers were immersed into the Pacific world in both the wallpaper and the video, while the contemporary visual technologies also reminded viewers of their distance from it. Exotic, erotic, scientific, historic – the modes of engagement are intellectual and affective, for both Enlightenment and contemporary viewers.
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- The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean , pp. 70 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023