644 the contemporary pacific • 19:2 (2007) American Pacificism: Oceania in the US Imagination, by Paul Lyons. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literature Series. New York: Routledge, 2006. isbn 0-415-35194-4; xii + 271 pages, notes, bibliography, index. us$105.00. Five years ago you would have been hard pressed to find any academic book about literary construction and production in Oceania. Until recently, Pacific studies drew almost exclusively from anthropology, history, and political science, rather than from literature. Even those trained in literary studies, including scholars in postcolonial and American studies, tended to overlook the region. Yet the few scholars who have engaged the literature of Oceania have not always met the continental-based marketing formulas of the major publishing houses. Thus it is deeply gratifying to see an expansion in the publishing of Pacific Island literatures, an ongoing reminder that creative writers rarely obey the national boundaries of our own disciplinary making. Pacific literary studies, by its very framework, is a regional and transnational endeavor, adding new, global dimensions to the writers who visited and sought inspiration from Oceanic contexts as well as the indigenous and local writers who have decolonized these literary legacies and have drawn from traditional Pacific art forms to pioneer new genres. Although many scholars have engaged with the eighteenth-century legacies of European colonialism in the Pacific, nineteenth and early twentieth century American inscriptions have received less attention. Paul Lyons’s book provides a useful genealogy of the Pacific insofar as it has been inscribed in the masculine US imagination by armchair travelers, tourists, colonists, naval officers, and seamen. Even those well versed in the literary production of the American Pacific will find the list of authors considered here to be vast, underlining how the formulation of US literature was so dependent on Oceanic contexts. The writers addressed in this study include Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Wilkes, Herman Melville, Robert Dean Frisbie, A Grove Day, James Warren Stoddard, Frederick O’Brien, James Michener, and many others. The chapters are organized in chronological order, beginning with a nineteenthcentury genealogy of the American Pacific archive. Lyons adopts Edward Said’s well-known concept of “Orientalism” to interrogate the US discursive construction of Oceania, an “American Pacificism.” While drawing attention to the ways in which each generation of writers drew heavily from its precursors, Lyons also outlines how national, material, commercial, and social demands shifted over time and thus impacted how Pacificism has been inscribed. These are complex and often paradoxical representations, which may combine on the one hand a “nationalistic stepping-stone narrative” of the region alongside a “nostalgic, oneiric, cover story that it never displaces” (27). In the first chapter of the book, Lyons helpfully adopts the semiotics of tourism theory to address the construction of American studies as it incorporated Pacificist texts, a touris- book and media reviews tic desire he traces to Melville’s earliest narratives and their reception. The mutually constitutive relation between the omnipresent cannibal narrative of the South Seas and its recuperation in tourist discourse demonstrates how Oceania “remains a vast field for the projection of a deeply racialized and fantasmatic vision of human history” (47). His second chapter outlines the role of American nautical adventure fiction and its indoctrination of young workers into a high-risk profession that coded US upward mobility in terms of its expansion into a mercantilist Pacific empire (49). Lyons points out that the presentation of Pacific Islanders as hospitable or hostile reflected American success or failure in commercial relations, a point that could have been more fully explored in terms of gender relations, particularly the construction of traveling masculinity. Chapter 3 examines the role of fear in the ubiquitous narrative of “eye-witness” cannibalism and its construction of misperception and trust, while chapter 4 turns to masculine friendship between Americans and Pacific Islanders and their inscription of erotics and politics. Lyons’s exploration of the homoerotics of the “e inoa” (friend, in Tahitian) or “taio” (in Marquesan) ceremony between US visitors and their male hosts turns to the expected figure of Herman Melville but also expands the analysis to include Henry Adams, the hypermasculine Jack London, and Willowdean Handy, one of the few women writers to be considered in the book. The later chapters of American Pacificism turn to the generation of “lotus eaters” such as James Warren 645 Stoddard and Robert Dean Frisbie, examining how literary tourism amplifies cultural difference and “economies of seeing that sustain gazing at others as a leisure and /or adventure activity” (124)—tropes that are replicated in contemporary travelogues by Paul Theroux and Larry McMurtry. In his final chapter, Lyons introduces the concept of “histouricism,” a discursive practice that conflates history with tourist narrative that represents itself as anti-racist even while it falls back on racial and class hierarchies of the colonial archive (151). Although it is not clear why gender would not also figure in the circulation of histouricism, the chapter provides a useful critique of the obfuscation of the illegal overthrow of the monarchy of Hawai‘i, particularly in the work of scholars such as A Grove Day, who was tremendously influential in Pacific letters in glorifying the Americanization of the Pacific. After a brief discussion of the politics of anthologizing Pacific literature, Lyons turns in his conclusion to contemporary indigenous writers. Certainly he would agree that the remarkable rise of Pacific literatures over the past three decades deserves more attention than allotted here. The “anti-tourist” literatures of Albert Wendt, Patricia Grace, Sudesh Mishra, Sia Figiel, and Alani Apio are positioned as a genre that “writes back against Pacificist logic” (178). Drawing from Teresia Teaiwa’s important critique of “militourism” in the region (“bikinis and other s /pacific n /oceans,” The Contemporary Pacific 6:87–109 [1994]), Lyons gives a broad overview of a remarkably large group 646 the contemporary pacific • 19:2 (2007) of writers from the “Polynesian” Pacific, including Aotearoa / New Zealand, Tonga, Hawai‘i, and Sämoa. This is a useful introduction to the anticolonial, anti-tourist idioms of the region’s writers, but the structure and placement necessarily limit it to voices directed against the American Pacificists rather than staging a dialogue between, for instance, Fiji and Hawai‘i. Unfortunately, the structure also suggests a belated (post-1970s) engagement of Pacific writers with their American precursors, rather than an ongoing and simultaneous colonial co-optation and decolonization, as the early twentieth century writings of complex figures such as Peter Buck / Te Rangi Hiroa and Florence “Johnny” Frisbie have demonstrated. Perhaps the most interesting component of this chapter is Lyons’s exploration of the Hawaiian plays of Alani Apio; although Pacific playwrights continue to produce along the levels of their novelist counterparts, they are not given due consideration. Lyons’s work is a very welcome contribution to the ongoing and dynamic body of Pacific literature scholarship, and an exceedingly well-researched genealogy of US Pacificism that implicates and informs the disciplines of anthropology, contemporary Pacific literature, and American studies. Leaving aside the book’s occasional typos and misspellings (along with the splitting of my $105 hardcopy binding), I hope that Routledge will soon release an affordable paperback edition. elizabeth deloughrey Cornell University * * * No Turning Back: A Memoir, by E T W Fulton, edited by Elizabeth Fulton Thurston. Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005. isbn 1-74076-141-3; xxi + 314 pages, maps, photographs, acronyms and abbreviations and glossary, notes, index. a$31.78. No Turning Back: A Memoir is divided into four parts—tracing Ted Fulton’s life from growing up in Sydney, through his prewar days in the Pacific, to his time as a soldier during World War II, and then back to New Britain. Nonetheless, the majority of the narrative relates to his time in what is modern-day Papua New Guinea. The memoir provides insight into the motivation behind a move to the region and the way in which it transformed his life and the lives of those around him. It touches on a selection of preand postwar existences available to these Australians and how they were able to use their experience during the war. Through these interactions, Fulton provides a view of the local people and the environment at peace, during the war and in its aftermath. There is a frankness about the tenor of the memoir. Fulton’s writing style is well described by the editor, his daughter, as consistent with “laconic understatement.” His stoicism belies the physical hardship, climatic extremes, disease, isolation, risk, stress, and the nature of the people, places, and situations in which he often finds himself. Throughout, Fulton displays dogged patience combined with a strong sense of respect for those who assisted his journey. There are also inherent geographical, practical, professional, and often emotional contrasts between the times he spends in Australia and those