Inventing "Easter Island"
By: by Beverley Haun.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 365
Subjects: Imperialism.; Easter Island -- History.; Easter Island -- Description and travel -- History.
Description: This study inquires into the narrative strategies and visual conventions in the discursive construction of "Easter Island," focusing on the geographic imaginary during the eighteenth-century period of imperial expansion. It begins with an investigation of the forces at play that served to shape the European version of the island and ends by considering contemporary representations in circulation outside the island culture. At the same time, the thesis is a case study of the island named by its inhabitants Rapa Nui and the different ways in which imperialism has been and continues to be positioned in relation to it. As a genealogical inquiry, this study attempts to reveal the development of a new discourse at the moment it appears in history as a constraining and empowering system. It is concerned with three key points of investigation. The first is an inquiry into the formation of "Easter Island" as a subject, how it was objectified through dividing practices that created it as a site for study of a particular kind, divided from other Pacific  islands and constituted as its own subject within the larger field of Pacific islands. Next it is an examination of how the constructed space and culture have been taken up, shaped and reshaped through permutations of the imperial and other discourses and represented in discursive spaces that can be organized chronologically and in a hierarchical manner from authoritative to fictive, from authentic artefact to appropriated fanciful image. Finally it is an inquiry into the implications of this analysis in relation to cultural memory, how the constraints of these texts and images shape and limit thought, action, and memory. Working with the poststructural idea that discursive formations are the specific, temporal, and cultural bases of disparate human histories and practices, and that as they are constructed, so they can be dismantled and reconstructed, the study ends by exploring pedagogically transformative practices that may serve to disrupt reflexive engagement with the idea of "Easter Island" and transform future engagement with the island's discursive space.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-365)