Across the Great Divide

Book excerpt: Across the Great Divide tracks a Pacific historian's fruitful, ambivalent engagements with History and Anthropology, anticipating experiments in each discipline with the other's theories and praxis. The revised and new essays comprising this collection provide systematic critiques of aspects of received scholarly wisdom about Oceania and are linked by reflexive commentaries addressing recent postcolonial concerns. A varied but coherent set of ethnographic and historical narratives about colonial encounters in Island Melanesia is informed by particular critical focus on the paradoxes and politics of knowing indigenous pasts through colonial texts.