2019 PAMLA Conference Presidential Address: “‘A Clown’s Nightmare of a Masquerade Ball’: John Kneubuhl’s The Moon and I”

Please join us for the 2019 PAMLA Presidential Address and Luncheon on Friday, November 15, beginning at 11:45 am. 2019 PAMLA President Dr. Stanley Orr will be delivering an address titled “‘A Clown’s Nightmare of a Masquerade Ball’: John Kneubuhl’s The Moon and I.” The Presidential Address Luncheon, which does involve an additional expense, is sure to be a highlight of the conference. Go here to make a reservation: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/

Professor Stanley Orr, PAMLA’s President and Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, will speak in his Presidential Address on The Moon and I (1942), a newly recognized play by Samoan-American dramatist John Kneubuhl (1920-1992). With recourse to contexts developed through Kneubuhl’s other stage and screen dramas, Orr will discuss the playwright’s experiments with the fale aitu (a dramatic Samoan clowning genre) as well as Modernist and postcolonial literary traditions. By turns tragic and comic, Naturalist and Symbolist, Polynesian and Western, The Moon and I emerges as an important work within Kneubuhl’s groundbreaking Oceanic Modernism ouevre.

Stanley Orr is Professor of English at University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, where he teaches courses in writing, literature, and screen studies. Orr earned a B.A. in English at U.C. Riverside and a Ph.D. in English at UCLA. He has published a number of essays in critical anthologies as well as articles in journals such as American Quarterly, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Orr’s book, Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir was published with the Ohio State University Press in 2010. In his latest publication— “Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’” (forthcoming in New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific [Routledge, 2019])—, Orr analyzes a 1961 episode that Kneubuhl contributed to the TV series Adventures in Paradise (1959-1962). In this small-screen drama, Orr argues, Kneubuhl evokes conventions of the fale aitu (a Samoan comedic performance genre) in order to parody and critique the South Sea romance.