HENK03617U Engelsk - Frit emne: Exotic and erotic gazes revisited: Cultural Representation in Oceania

In this course on the South Pacific, also know to people of the region asOceania, we will take a point of departure in three centuries of imperial, missionary, ethnographical, and European literary representations of the peoples and cultures of the region. We will read a selection of shorter texts by cultural ‘outsiders’ to the place (explorers, evangelists, beachcombers, anthropologists and travel writers) and explore how they construct the Pacific as space and as cultural domain. In contrast to such texts we will then compare and discuss contemporary critical work and literary writings by the ‘insiders’, the indigenous people of New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and other islands. The course will be interdisciplinary and the texts will invite us into a renewing dialogue about the many conflicting ‘discourses’ at work in South Pacific Studies over time and in particular in the contemporary era of globalisation. Texts to be announced.