Matt K. Matsuda

“THIS TERRITORY WAS NOT EMPTY”: PACIFIC POSSIBILITIES

Narratives concerning Pacific Ocean territories are often historically derived from European and American mainland visions of great, empty oceans dotted with deserted and uninhabited islands. However, research by indigenous and outlander scholars, along with struggles for political and cultural autonomy in the Pacific, has brought attention to vital island communities and 6has raised questions about a Pacific‐island way of understanding the world. This understanding is traced through scholarly and artistic engagements with history, island‐community studies, and navigational philosophies and is framed by a growing theoretical literature on epistemologies of place from the disciplines of geography and oceanography.

The tears of Madame Chrysanthème: love and history in France's Japan

1 André Messager, Madame Chrysanthème (Paris: 1893), lyrics, G. Hartmann and A. Alexandre, collection of Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris, no. 2199, 263-4. Special thanks to the staff of the Maison de Pierre Loti and the Loti Archives at the Bibliothèque de la Ville in Rochefort, France, and the Musée Guimet in Paris. 2 For the overlapping histories of John Luther Long, David Belasco and Puccini’s Butterfly with Loti’s and Messager’s Chrysanthème, see Jacques Legrand, ’Madame Chrysanthème au théâtre’, in Le Japon de Pierre Loti (Rochefort: Revue Pierre Loti, 1988) and Sophie Daniel, De Chrysanthème à

Sea changes and spice islands

The most famous tree in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia stands off a little road that turns up the flank of the Gamalama Volcano, rising high in a hot, humid, and aromatic wood of clove and nutmeg. Amidst the other greenery that blankets the island of Ternate, this giant clove, knotted and gnarled, is famous for sprouting hundreds of kilos of fragrant leaves and fruit, as it has done for nearly four hundred years. The tree has a local and personal name, Afo, simply understood as “the giant.” It is famed not only for its size and generous productivity, but because it is a living sign of survival and defiance: a tree that at one time would have been cut down and burned if its existence had been known. Afo stands over a history that took the lives of many islanders – and other trees – across the centuries.

The Construction of Memory in Interwar France

This work takes a look at the human impact of World War I by examining the ways in which the French remembered their veterans and war dead after the armistice. Arguing that memory is more than just a record of experience, this cultural history offers a perspective on how commemoration of World War I helped to shape post-war French society and politics. Daniel Sherman shows how a wartime visual culture saturated with images of ordinary foot soldiers, together with contemporary novels, memoirs and tourist literature, promoted a distinctive notion of combat experience. The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Post-war commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstobes, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemorations competing goals - to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved and to incorporate mourners individual memories into a larger political discourse.