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Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas, by Christopher B Balme. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. isbn 978-1-4039-8598-9, xiv + 256 pages, figures, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$80.00.
In Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas, theater historian and theorist Christopher B Balme offers not just an investigation of theatrical events depicting colonial encounters, but also a wider paradigm of the theatricality of cultural encounters in colonial contexts more broadly. This approach offers a useful intervention in and addition to scholarship in colonial and postcolonial studies, Pacific studies, history, and anthropology.
Arguing that "cross-cultural contacts were theatrical as much as they were economic, sexual or political," Balme says that "much took place, and still does, in modes that we generally subsume under the term 'performance'" (xii). Noting the ways that performances, such as music and dance, have figured centrally in colonial encounters, tourism, and postcolonial movements, he urges us, as scholars, to more actively engage these dimensions of history.
While it is certainly true that more scholarship examining the intersection of theater and colonialism in the Pacific is overdue, Balme's larger contribution lies in his proposal that "theatricality, or the discursive practice of theatricalizing other peoples and places," was a necessary prerequisite for later colonial enterprises. In the Pacific, such an approach is especially useful, he argues, because of "remarkably persistent and recurring patterns of perception and representation" by colonizers of indigenous peoples (xii-xiii). In short, beyond urging more academic attention to the performing arts, he provides a different paradigm for investigating colonial relations, one that recognizes the selfconscious manipulation of representations by both colonizers and colonized in an active contestation over the deployment of meanings.
Starting with an oft-told moment of Dutch navigator Abel Tasman's encounter with indigenous Mäori inhabitants in Aotearoa, Balme notes the importance of performative exchanges. In European reports of the voyage, some Mäori responded to the arrival of Tasman's ship in their harbor with "sounds like . . . Trumpets," no doubt blowing on shells (20). Probably misinterpreting this as a welcome, not a warning, Tasman instructed his sailors to mimic the sound, trumpeting back on a...