from darkness to light in the George Brown Jubilee: the invention of nontradition and the inscription of a national history in East New Britain

In this article, we examine the reasons that Duke of York Islanders in Papua New Guinea's East New Britain Province were greatly amused by their own annual “Jubilee” performance, one incorporating remarkably racist imagery about their ancestors. During the performance, which celebrated the 1875 arrival of the first Methodist missionaries, the ancestors were depicted as bumbling savages who were then “civilized,” brought from darkness to light Contrasting the performance we witnessed in 1991 to several described in the late 1920s, we demonstrate that the play frame had changed: that which was funny in 1991 had not been so before. The change entailed a repositioning of the present with respect to the past in response to shifting power relations from the period of colonial domination to that of nation formation. [Papua New Guinea, nationalism, performance, humor]