The ‘uncorrupted’ Paradise: Religion and imperial epistemic violence on Pitcairn Island

Abstract

This article analyses chapters from Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817) and Rosalind Amelia Young’s Mutiny of the Bounty and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790‐1894 (1894) in the context of US American perception of Pitcairn Island’s cultural identity. It envisions both Delano’s account of the island and the Californian Seventh-day Adventists’ missionary work, as described by Young, as examples of epistemic violence. The latter derives from imperial misrepresentations of the islanders as well as an imposition of US American cultural identity upon them. The violence committed against Pitcairn’s community is discussed in connection to Delano’s self-proclaimed approach of non-intervention and his depiction of the islanders as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘children of nature’, as well as to the direct involvement of the Adventists who converted the islanders. This article tests whether Delano’s and the Adventists’ approaches are mutually exclusive or whether they represent two different visions of the same imperialist project to constitute Pitcairn Islanders as the colonial ‘Other’.