Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters

Abstract

In this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.