In this absorbing and accessible study, Jeffrey Geiger explains how the islands of Polynesia figured in the North American imagination in the years after the First World War as Americans gazed westward to find inspiration or to escape from the strictures of their own society and existence. As the accounts of travelers became more widely available, writers and filmmakers brought to a domestic US audience a “South Seas” mythical space of “beaches, coral reefs, lagoons, coconut palms, and alluring native bodies, all holding the promise of sensual indulgence” (5).

To accomplish this task, Geiger presents a linked narrative of several individuals who traveled and worked in Polynesia during the 1920s and into the early years of the Great Depression, including the journalist Frederick O'Brien (author of the 1920 bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas), Robert and Frances Hubbard Flaherty, the Hollywood director W. S. Van Dyke, and expatriate German director F. W. Murnau. Their texts and representations are not offered here as simplistic manifestations of imperialist power and ideology, but as more complex and multifaceted images, often contesting established conventions; in this sense, a South Seas setting was the place where the “racial and sexual confusion” of the US postwar years might be projected (13). Polynesia was brought to a mass American public about to embark on a decade where social and cultural categories were set to experience considerable upheaval; as Geiger puts it, “the South Pacific fad would perfectly exemplify the Jazz Age, an era known for relaxed morals, social innovations, and cultural fetishisms” (115). But while cultural producers were manufacturing fantasy images of the islands and their inhabitants for a home market, the area itself was undergoing the harsh reality of transformation, as the impact of Western political and commercial intervention, not least the extension of American empire into the Pacific, was experienced. These “westward visions” of life in the Pacific, as Geiger highlights, also served the function of distracting attention from domestic tensions at home, over issues such as national identity, race, and changing gender relationships.

All in all this is a fascinating and many-layered study that as well as illuminating images and conceptions of Polynesia in the interwar years, before the arrival of full-scale American hegemony, also shows how the efforts of individuals concerned to represent Polynesian culture cast a mirror on their own personal identities and conflicted selves.

As Geiger reminds us, the “psychic hold” that images of the South Pacific have on American audiences is all too readily apparent today through the number and popularity of television shows which choose the area for its evocative settings, suggesting “solitude, release from cares, and … renewal from urbanized modern life” (1). In this sense, the connections between the present and the cultural imagination of the 1920s seem remarkably close.