Footnotes to History: Marginalizing Polynesia in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Song of Rahéro” and “The Feast of Famine” (1890)

This chapter investigates the complex relationship between the textual margins and the marginalization of Pacific peoples in Robert Louis Stevenson’s endnotes for his Polynesian poetic epics “The Song of Rahéro” and “The Feast of Famine”. In these annotations, Stevenson provides definitions of Tahitian and Marquesan terms and quasi-anthropological information, drawing on his travel experiences in the region in 1889. Stevenson deploys these notes to contest the peripheral position given to the Pacific within Western models of “universal” history and gain a more sympathetic hearing for the economically and geopolitically marginalized peoples of Polynesia. However, by interposing a Western voice as a mediating authority and framing the Polynesians as ethnographic subjects, Stevenson nonetheless reaffirms and legitimizes their marginalization.