An Archipelago of Influence: Pitcairn Islanders from Literary Contradictions to Focal Points in British and U.S. American 19th Century Colonial Writing 

This project analyzes nineteenth century British and U.S. American literary representations of Pitcairn Islanders primarily through lenses of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, informed by related academic fields of Archipelagic Studies and decolonial/Indigenous Pacific Studies. Seemingly outside of the sphere of imperial struggles for the domination in the Pacific, Pitcairn Islanders, people of mixed English-Tahitian heritage, were continuously reinvented as socio-cultural contradictions in the British and U.S. American literature, symbolizing at first a ‘paradise found’ and gradually turning into ‘wretches’ in need of an ‘enlightened’ religious-civilizational intervention. These shifts in perception at first appear to be roughly following wider changes and ‘disenchantments’ with the “Oriental Islands” and their Indigenous Inhabitants. Pitcairn Islanders are thus ‘written’ into a nexus of colonial history of the Pacific conquest, though seemingly located on its margins. The main aim of this project is to invalidate this marginalization and argue how the Anglo-U.S. American texts produced about colonial-Pitcairn encounters indeed established them as subjects of the imperial gaze in the focus of converging imperial projects. It will also use Indigenous Pacific decolonial knowledge production and activism to reinterpret the role of Pitcairn Islanders in wider imperial efforts and the Pacific counter-actions to it.

• Pitcairn Island
• Archipelagic Studies
• Pacific Studies
• Nineteenth Century Pacific Travel Narratives
• Contradiction Studies
• Epistemic Violence in Colonial Literature
• US American Imperialism/Exceptionalism