April Hail

April Hail

PICTURING PARADISE

Picturing Paradise explored the genealogy of stereotypical representations of Hawai'i and the South Pacific. The combination of a beautiful tropical landscape and the hyperbole of 20th century marketing practices does not fully explain the cultural value of these images; the now-iconic imagery of the Polynesian fantasy has its roots in ancient ideas about the 'other' in Western discourse, Utopian fantasy, and particularly modernist tropes of thought. This study explores early projections of terra australis, myths of first contact between Polynesia and the West, and the cultural conditions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries which fueled the propagation of specific representations of Hawai'i and the South Pacific.