The word, the pen, and the pistol
Subtitle: literature and power in Tahiti
By: Robert Nicole.
Series: SUNY series on the sublime
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
Subjects: Tahitians -- Ethnic identity; Politics and culture; East and West; Tahiti -- Civilization -- Foreign influences
Description: "The Word, The Pen, and the Pistol explores the relationships between history, power, knowledge, and certain cultural productions such as literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Borrowing from the theoretical works of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, the book reveals in the French colonial territory of French Polynesia the complicit relationship between imperialism and colonial texts, between the image of Tahiti as "paradise on earth" and other instruments of management, and between discourses such as the "Noble Savage" and various technologies of discipline and ordering. In particular, the book discusses the role that such men as Buffon, Rousseau, Bouganville, Loti, Gauguin, and Gobineau and institutions such as science, phrenology, scholarship, racism, travel literature, education, and tourism played in creating, supporting, authorizing, disseminating and enforcing certain images of the Polynesian.

The book simultaneously details the complex and diverse responses of Maohi people to these romanticized Western discourses and reconstructs the spaces used by them to inscribe their resistance."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-223) and index.