Colonial Refractions of a Malakulan Chief

What is it about?

This paper brings together archival resources from disparate disciplines – colonial-era adventure-travelogue and mission history – to uncover an unacknowledged relationship between the American film-maker and photographer Martin Johnson and Australian Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in Vanuatu between 1917 and 1920. My focus is a Big Nambas village on Malakula, Vanuatu, which found itself the nexus of conflicting colonial gazes. Representations of its headman Nihapat, refracted through the lenses of a travelogue-adventurer and the narratives of missionaries, highlight Indigenous agency as he and his people contended with their predicament under colonialism

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