Download or read book Political Life Writing in the Pacific written by Jack Corbett and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-29 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about leadership and ‘dirty hands’. These are general themes but they take on a particular significance in the Pacific context and so the contributions explore these themes in relation to patterns of colonisation and the memory of independence; issues elliptically captured by terms like ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’; the nature of ‘self’ presented in Pacific life writing; and the tendency for many of these texts to be written by ‘outsiders’, or at least the increasingly contested nature of what that term means.
Download or read book Life Writing from the Pacific Rim written by Stanley Schab and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being Political written by Jack Corbett and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-01-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians everywhere tend to attract cynicism and inspire disillusionment. They are supposed to epitomize the promise of democratic government and yet invariably find themselves cast as the enemy of every virtue that system seeks to uphold. In the Pacific, "politician" has become a byword for corruption, graft, and misconduct. This was not always the case—the independence generation is still remembered as strong leaders—but today's leaders are commonly associated with malaise and despair. Once heroes of self-determination, politicians are now the targets of donor attempts to institute "good governance," while Fiji's 2006 coup was partly justified on the grounds that they needed "cleaning up." But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay, and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region's political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We learn that politics is a messy, unpredictable, and, at times, dirty business that nonetheless inspires service and sacrifice. We come to understand how being a politician has changed since independence and consider what this means for how we think about issues of corruption and misconduct. We find that politics is deeply embedded in the lives of individuals, families, and communities; an account that belies the common characterization of democracy in the Pacific as a "façade" or "foreign flower." Ultimately, this is a sympathetic counter-narrative to the populist critique. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human—neither saints nor sinners—is timely given the wave of cynicism and disaffection. As such, this book is a must read for all those who believe in the promise of representative government.
Download or read book Being Political written by Jack Corbett (Political scientist) and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the Pacific region's political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job.
Download or read book Nuanua written by Albert Wendt and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important anthology of contemporary Pacific writing in English is a successor to Lali, first published in 1980 and widely read and admired. Nuanua, like Lali, edited by distinguished Samoan writer Albert Wendt, shows the growing strength and confidence of Pacific writing in fiction and poetry since 1980. It includes work from new and well-established writers from nine Pacific communities: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Samoa. The legacy of colonialism and the problems of development and political change are among the themes explored.
Download or read book Remaking Micronesia written by David L. Hanlon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's efforts at economic development in the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands proved to be about transforming in dramatic fashion people who occupied real estate deemed vital to American strategic concerns. Called "Micronesians," these island people were regarded as other, and their otherness came to be seen as incompatible with American interests. And so, underneath the liberal rhetoric that surrounded arguments, proposals, and programs for economic development was a deeper purpose. America's domination would be sustained by the remaking of these islands into places that had the look, feel, sound, speed, smell, and taste of America - had the many and varied plans actually succeeded. However, the gap between intent and effect holds a rich and deeply entangled history. Remaking Micronesia stands as an important, imaginative, much needed contribution to the study of Micronesia, American policy in the Pacific, and the larger debate about development. It will be an important source of insight and critique for scholars and students working at the intersection of history, culture, and power in the Pacific.
Download or read book Bearing Witness written by Doug Munro and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brij V. Lal is a singular scholar. His work has spanned disciplines—from history to politics—and genres—from conventional monograph history, to participant history, political commentary, encyclopaedia, biography and faction. Brij is without doubt the most eminent scholar Fiji has ever produced. He also remains the most significant public intellectual of his country, despite having been banned from entering it in 2009. He is also one of the leading Pacific historians of his generation, and an internationally recognised authority on the Indian diaspora. This Festschrift volume celebrates, reflects upon and extends the life and work of this colourful scholar. The essays, whose contributors are drawn from across the globe, do more than review Brij’s work; they also probe his contribution to both scholarly and political life. This book will therefore serve as an invaluable guide for readers from all walks of life seeking to better situate and understand the impact of Brij’s scholarly activism on Fiji and beyond." — Clive Moore, University of Queensland "It is a pleasure to commend this collection of very different essays that celebrate, reflect upon and extend the life and work of a remarkable scholar. Although I have had, at times, a close association with Brij Lal’s life and work, I have learned much from reading this book. It provokes further thought about the course of democracy in Fiji, and the very sorry state and future of Pacific history and the humanities in academia. Here is a timely assertion of the significance and major contribution that courageous scholars such as Brij have made to the study and public awareness of these areas of concern." — Jacqueline Leckie, University of Otago
Download or read book The Art and Craft of Comparison written by John Boswell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to compare French presidential politics with village leadership in rural India? Most social scientists are united in thinking such unlikely juxtapositions are not feasible. Boswell, Corbett and Rhodes argue that they are possible. This book explains why and how. It is a call to arms for interpretivists to embrace creatively comparative work. As well as explaining, defending and illustrating the comparative interpretive approach, this book is also an engaging, hands-on guide to doing comparative interpretive research, with chapters covering design, fieldwork, analysis and writing. The advice in each revolves around 'rules of thumb', grounded in experience, and illustrated through stories and examples from the authors' research in different contexts around the world. Naturalist and humanist traditions have thus far dominated the field but this book presents a real alternative to these two orthodoxies which expands the horizons of comparative analysis in social science research.
Download or read book Different Lives written by Hans Renders and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Internationally acclaimed biographies are mostly written by Anglophone biographers. How does biography function as a public genre in the rest of the world? Different Lives offers a global perspective on the biographical tradition by seventeen scholars of fifteen different countries.
Download or read book Pacific Islands Writing written by Michelle Keown and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. The first book of its kind, Pacific Islands Writing offers a broad-ranging introduction to the postcolonial literatures of the Pacific region. Drawing upon metaphors of oceanic voyaging, Michelle Keown takes the reader on a discursive journey through a variety of literary and cultural contexts in the Pacific, exploring the Indigenous literatures of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, and also investigating a range of European or Western writing about the Pacific, from the adventure fictions of Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson, and Jack London to the Päkehä (European) settler literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The book explores the relevance of 'international' postcolonial theoretical paradigms to a reading of Pacific literatures, but it also offers a region-specific analysis of key authors and texts, drawing upon indigenous Pacific literary theories, and sketching in some of the key socio-historical trajectories that have inflected Pacific writing. Well-established Indigenous Pacific authors such as Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, Alan Duff, and Patricia Grace are considered alongside emerging writers such as Sia Figiel, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, and Dan Taulapapa McMullin. The book focuses primarily upon Pacific literature in English - the language used by the majority of Pacific writers - but also breaks new ground in examining the growing corpus of francophone and hispanophone writing in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Easter Island/Rapa Nui.
Download or read book War without Mercy written by John Dower and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”
Download or read book Ron Crocombe written by Linda Crowl and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is divided into broad categories of land, politics, history and culture showing the wide-ranging interests of the Crocombes and the writers they inspired. As to be expected, many chapters discuss the Cook Islands, where the Crocombes returned year after year and based themselves in 'retirement'. Other chapters analyse and discuss the historical, linguistic, political and other kinds of links radiating throughout our region. This very Pacific book is an example of the cross cultural, interdisciplinary, all-encompassing way in which Ron and Marjorie worked.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 1141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The New Port Moresby written by Ceridwen Spark and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua New Guinea explores the ways in which educated, professional women experience living in Port Moresby, the burgeoning capital of Papua New Guinea. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, the book adds to an emerging literature on cities in the “Global South” as sites of oppression, but also resistance, aspiration, and activism. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, the book draws on a decade of research conducted among the educated professional women of Port Moresby, offering unique insight into class transitions and the perspectives of this small but significant cohort. The New Port Moresby expands the scope of research and writing about gendered experiences in Port Moresby, moving beyond the idea that the city is an exclusively hostile place for women. Without discounting the problems of uneven development, the author argues that the city’s new places offer women a degree of freedom and autonomy in a city predominantly characterized by fear and restriction. In doing so, it offers an ethnographically rich perspective on the interaction between the “global” and the “local” and what this might mean for feminism and the advancement of equity in the Pacific and beyond. The New Port Moresby will find an audience among anthropologists, particularly those interested in the urban Pacific, feminist geographers committed to expanding research to include cities in the Global South and development theorists interested in understanding the roles played by educated elites in less economically developed contexts. There have been few ethnographic monographs about Port Moresby and those that do exist have tended to marginalize or ignore gender. Yet as feminist geographers make clear, women and men are positioned differently in the world and their relationship to the places in which they live is also different. The book has no predecessors and stands alone in the Pacific as an account of this kind. As such, The New Port Moresby should be read by scholars and students of diverse disciplines interested in urbanization, gender, and the Pacific.
Download or read book Democracy in Small States written by Jack Corbett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Populism and the personalization of politics appears to be threatening the existence of democracy as we know it all over the world. It is now more important than ever to understand the history of this form of regime: why it has thrives and fails. But, existing studies are limited by their focus on a few large and predominately rich states. This book takes the opposite approach: it investigates how politics is practiced in the smallest states where hyper-personalization has always been a ubiquitous feature of political life. It optimistically finds that hyper-personalized democracy can actually persist against all odds, but also cautions that political practices in small states are often markedly different to larger states. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Download or read book Telling Pacific Lives written by Vicki Luker and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume of essays is an exploration of the way in which scholars from different disciplines, standpoints and theoretical orientations attempt to write life stories in the Pacific. It is the product of a conference organised by the Division of Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University in December 2005. The aim of the conference was to explore ways in which Pacific lives are read and constructed through a variety of media: films, fiction, faction, history under four overarching themes. The first, Framing Lives, sought to explore various ways of constructing a life from a classic western perspective of birth, formation, experiences and death of an individual to other ways, for example, life as secondary to a longer genealogical entity, life as a symbol of collective experience, individual lives captured and fragmented in a mosaic of others, lives made meaningful by their implication in a particular historical or cultural web, the underlying values and world views that inform one or another approach to framing a life. The second theme, the Stuff of Life, looked at materials, methods and collaborative arrangements with which the biographer, autobiographer and recorder work, their objectives, constraints, inspirations, challenges and tricks. The third section, Story Lines, focused on formats and genres such as edited diaries, collections of writings, voice recordings, genres of biography autobiography, truth and fiction (verse, dance, novels) and the varieties and different advantages of narrative shapes that crystallise the telling of a life. The final section, Telling Lives/Changing Lives, focused on biography/autobiography and the consciousness of identity, history, purpose, lives as witness and windows, telling lives as change for those involved in the tale, the telling, the listening. The overall aim was to bring out both the generic or universal challenges of telling lives as well as to highlight the particular tendencies and trends in the Pacific. Yet these four themes, which seemed analytically promising at the outset, proved in practice difficult to disentangle from the presentations at the workshop"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book After Henry written by Joan Didion and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incisive essays on Patty Hearst and Reagan, the Central Park jogger and the Santa Ana winds, from the New York Times–bestselling author of South and West. In these eleven essays covering the national scene from Washington, DC; California; and New York, the acclaimed author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album “capture[s] the mood of America” and confirms her reputation as one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers (The New York Times). Whether dissecting the 1988 presidential campaign, exploring the commercialization of a Hollywood murder, or reporting on the “sideshows” of foreign wars, Joan Didion proves that she is one of the premier essayists of the twentieth century, “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review). Highlights include “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” a portrait of the White House under the stewardship of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, two “actors on location;” and “Girl of the Golden West,” a meditation on the Patty Hearst case that draws an unexpected and insightful parallel between the kidnapped heiress and the emigrants who settled California. “Sentimental Journeys” is a deeply felt study of New York media coverage of the brutal rape of a white investment banker in Central Park, a notorious crime that exposed the city’s racial and class fault lines. Dedicated to Henry Robbins, Didion’s friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979, After Henry is an indispensable collection of “superior reporting and criticism” from a writer on whom we have relied for more than fifty years “to get the story straight” (Los Angeles Times).
