Body Trade
Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific

Edited by Barbara Creed & Jeanette Hoorn

Key Points

• Accessible and timely
• Sample of some of the best work in postcolonial studies

A compelling collection of essays on the ‘traffic’ in human bodies in the Pacific from the eighteenth century until today. International scholars examine the ‘captive body’ as it is represented in a range of media from Captain Cook’s journals and Melville’s novels to popular culture and film, including Jedda, Meet Me In St Louis and The Murmuring. This book revisits Europe’s colonial project in the Pacific, exposing the myths surrounding the trade in heads, cannibalism, captive white women, the display of indigenouse people in fairs and circuses, Australia’s stolen generations, the ‘comfort’ women and the making of the exotice/erotic body.

Contents

Part 1 Circus, Trade & Spectacle
Part 2 Manufacturing the ‘Cannibal’ Body
Part 3 Captive White Bodies & the Colonial Imaginary in Terra Australis
Part 4 Film, Desire & the Colonised Body

Contributors

Julie Carr, Barbara Creed, Kate Darian-Smith, Robert Dixon, Freda Freiberg, Chris Healy, Jeanette Hoorn, Yves Le Fur, Paul Lyons, Mary Mackay, Susan K. Martin, Gananath Obeyesekere, Paul Turnbull

Barbara Creed is the author of the acclaimed book The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge) and has written on film and popular culture for a range of international journals and anthologies. She is Professor, Screen Studies, and Head of the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

Jeanette Hoorn is Associate Professor of Visual Cultures, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Her latest book is Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (2007).

Book details

Popular culture, postcolonial studies
ISBN 1 877276 12 X, 978 1 877276 12 5, paperback, 320 pages, illustrated, $39.95
Published co-op with Pluto Press and Routledge: 2001

^ Top of page