The Legacy of Planter Jean My: Analysis of Two Private Colonial Homes in Southern Melanesia

Lagarde, Louis

doi:10.1080/00223344.2016.1193271

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Colonial houses are enveloped in the mythmaking attached to Michener as a writer and the characters in his stories, with views of Ambae appearing and disappearing into the mist (Lagarde 2016). In these accounts, the island of Ambae is stripped of indigenous stories of ancestral figures and creation and renamed as the mythical Bali Ha'i to serve as a backdrop for tourists.…”

Section: Adventures In Paradisementioning

confidence: 99%

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2018

The Contemporary Pacific

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Visual representations and narrative accounts of Pacific landscapes matter. Long-established ideas of the Pacific as paradise are not empty tropes; rather, they are instrumental in the ongoing recolonization of Indigenous landscapes by foreigners. Beginning with the experience of the filming of Survivor: Vanuatu-Islands of Fire in North Efate, located just twentyfive minutes from Port Vila, this article describes how the television series resulted in a rapacious demand by expatriate investors to lease customary land. Building from the filming of Survivor, this article explores how real estate and tourism campaigns in Vanuatu and elsewhere in the Pacific cultivate foreign desire in ways that both motivate and enable the possession of Indigenous landscapes. Pacific real estate and tourism campaigns offer visions of paradisiacal, empty landscapes that function as playgrounds for white people. By reproducing the narrative tropes that frame the foreign imaginary of the Pacific, the images of real estate and tourism campaigns create a cultural loop in which Pacific landscapes become, once more, saturated with desire.Visual representations enable the colonization of space, which is not only "about soldiers and cannons . . . but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings" (Said 1993, 7). Ideas of paradise have animated foreign imaginings of "exotic" landscapes for hundreds of years. Colonial expeditions imagined paradise as a kind of New World treasure trove ripe for exploitation. In this way, paradise became linked to the "'long' modernity of the capitalist system, implicated in the discourses of material exploitation and colonization" (Deckard 2010, 2-3). From the sixteenth century, the rhetoric of paradise emboldened colonial ventures to find new "treasure lands" where European colonizers could extract

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Section: Adventures In Paradisementioning

confidence: 99%