Facing the Pacific Book

The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west--connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, renewal from urbanized modern life. Facing the Pacific is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States' intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad. Geiger looks at a variety of texts that helped to invent a vision of Polynesia for U.S. audiences, focusing on a group of writers and filmmakers whose mutual fascination with the South Pacific drew them together--and would eventually drive some of them apart. Each had a lasting impact on U.S. conceptions of the Pacific during the 1920s and early 1930s. This period of dramatic economic recovery, boom, and downfall also witnessed a crisis in American subjectivity, when the U.S. was preoccupied with rapidly shifting notions of race, gender, and national belonging.