THERE ARE FEW artists who’ve shaped Westerners’ visions of the island paradise as much as the Postimpressionist French painter Paul Gauguin, who spent time in Tahiti and other locations in French Polynesia more than a century ago. And yet Gauguin was himself seduced by the romantic idea of the island Eden presented through Western cultural works like 1719’s Robinson Crusoe.
One of the first British novels ever published, is, essentially a story of colonization — as Elif Batuman notes in a recent issue of — focusing on an Englishman exploiting the natural and human resources of an island. Batuman points to Edward Said’s 1993 book of essays, to suggest the novel — as a format of
