Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific Press, 2015. 202 pp. (B&W and some coloured photos.) US$60.00, paper. ISBN 978-982-01-0941-4.
There is a wealth of scholarly literature about Oceania and colonialism but very little exists that focuses specifically on postcards and their important link to colonialism. This accessible volume by Max Quanchi (a scholar of Pacific history and the history of photography) and Max Shekleton (the owner of the 60,000-plus postcard collection used for the book) is a welcome addition to the literature. The authors’ goal is to mine the images from the “postcard craze” period (1890s through 1930s) to explore the interrelated histories of photography, anthropology, and colonialism. They underscore the contrary and complex readings of the images, and shed light on the convoluted production processes in which Euro-American photographers often stage images, and printers often twist captions and incorporate faulty information. The book combines textual information alongside more than two hundred images of postcards as examples of the variety of images, colouring techniques, and styles employed.
The first chapter introduces the key ideas. One is that postcards relied on images and captions that portrayed people and settings in generalized and distant ways. Individuals were rarely named and were referred to as “native,” “warrior,” “chief,” etc. For example, a club-wielding Kanak man has the label “Kanak warrior, New Caledonia.” A cluster of houses under coconut palms captioned “Scene along Agana River, Guam” becomes the idyllic “South Seas” village. A second idea is that postcard images were open to multiple interpretations. “Readers in the early 20th century may have thought postcards were an authentic record of empire, proven by the stamp, scribbled message, and origin out in the colonies, but we argue in the following chapters that postcards offered selective, mediated and multiple meanings” (14). Many things—captions, cropping, colour, format, style of publication, and manner of distribution—all affected the audience’s interpretations. Was the Kanak warrior made to pose with his club or did he choose to proudly display his identity in that way? Does the romantic image of the village indicate an unchanged world? Or do depictions of wharves, schools, roads, and ships indicate unwanted change? Third, and most important for the authors, there is the persistent theme of colonialism. “Colonial propaganda underpins nearly every photograph and postcard” (27). For example, a posed photo of uniformed men in formation conveys colonial order, European authority, and loyal subjects.
The second chapter describes the postcard craze that began soon after the first postcard was produced in 1861. The authors outline the history and details of postcard production, where German suppliers were the main manufacturers. They describe how identical images were recycled, with slight changes to the way they were cropped, tinted, given new codes and captions, or reversed on the page. These changes make it difficult to correctly attribute the cards and images today.
Following the two introductory chapters, the remainder of the text is organized sensibly into six chapters that focus on various topics that the authors have extracted from studying the images: the picturesque, portraits, village life, traditional culture, town life, and colonialism. “The Picturesque” category includes romantic scenes of mountain peaks, lush valleys, and cascading waterfalls, all formulaic images indicating European penetration of the wild interior. In terms of numbers of postcards this was the least popular category. “Portraits” comprises posed unnamed individuals that indicate a Western “scientific” interest in the expression of faces and the shapes of heads and noses. These images usually include markers of “South Sea” islanders, such as tattoos, scarification, and bodily adornment. Many were staged with a portable backdrop. Not surprisingly, the majority were images of women, thus satisfying Western interest in exotic female bodies. “Village Life” includes postcards of houses, which were easy to photograph and were seen as symbols of primitive life. House-building techniques that illustrated pandanus weaving, post erecting, and roof thatching appealed to Western interest in indigenous technology. Ironically, everything was labelled “village” even though the local inhabitants usually used this term to refer only to the European-dominated administrative centre, and not to the hamlets where they lived.
Postcards in the category of “Traditional Culture”—showing pottery, tapa making, fishing, gardening, food preparation, dancing, kava ceremonies, and men climbing coconut trees—exemplify the abundance of errors that can occur when staging and labelling. Although customs were changing, as seen in images of ox-carts and European clothing, a search for authenticity seems to lie behind many of these images. The “Town Life” category includes streets, wharves, stores, banks, hotels, schools, and churches, as well as tidy streets lined with businesses and houses with verandas, all communicating messages about the success of empire, Christianity, and modernization. This category comprises about half of all images produced, although 95 percent of indigenous people did not live in towns. The chapter on “Colonialism,” with its images of busy natives and bustling activity, best illustrates the mixed messages of the postcards. Is the behaviour benign and beneficial or exploitative and oppressive? Postcards, of course, tended to depict only the benign side of colonialism through pictures of schools, churches, parades, monuments, women in Mother Hubbard dresses, and the clearing and replanting of land for plantations. There are no portrayals of patrol officers collecting taxes or inspecting latrines. One would have to read beyond the margins of the postcard to understand a more accurate portrayal of colonialism.
Postcards from Oceania is a clear and concise text that is highly descriptive in nature. The book could have been even more engaging had the authors pushed further and presented some analytical ideas about such broad topics as visual imagery, authenticity, authority, or impact. In the introduction they say that interpreting these visual images can complement interpretations based solely on textual documents, yet they never actually pursue this intriguing notion. Also, more information about the photographers and manufacturers would have been welcome. These minor quibbles aside, the book is definitely a worthwhile contribution to the literature.
Miriam Kahn
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
pp. 423-425