Partial texts:Representation, colonialism and agency in pacific history∗

outlines' of the discipline of Pacific history in academic circles and the forms 'of the contemporary desire to illuminate the present through an understanding of the past' that might be identified both in the Pacific Islands and in countries such as Australia and the United States, where Pacific history is produced and dis seminated both in universities and more public channels such as museum exhibitions and television documentaries. The historical, institutional, and intel lectual situations of the discipline have changed considerably since Davidson set out a charter in a lecture in 1955, and reconsideration of the discipline's assump tions and orientations seems overdue.3 Emphasising the ways in which larger questions of orientation and substantive problems are entangled, I review epis temological, theoretical and interpretative questions. This is inevitably a selec tive exercise; claims about conventional styles and approaches in a discipline or subdiscipline can only suppress the field's actual diversity.4 The aim is not to set