Shari Sabeti

Stemming from the AHRC funded Remediating Stevenson project which explored the contemporary legacy of the Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson, this book project draws on ethnographic and autoethnographic research in Edinburgh (Stevenson’s birthplace) and Sāmoa, where Stevenson lived for the last four years of his life and where he is buried. It includes interviews with key figures in Sāmoa, including descendants of Stevenson’s household staff, employees at the RLS Museum, his gravesite at the top of Mount Vaea and the Chief and residents of Vailima village nearby.  I weave these in with elements of autoethnography, exploring my own growing relationship to Stevenson and his work, my visits to his burial site and the surprising parallels in our stories.  

The book will sit at the intersection of social research, personal memoir, literary biography, literary criticism, and travel writing. It is informed by a feminist and decolonial lens in that my personal relationship to, and with, Stevenson is a prism through which I explore relationships (both mine and his) to place, exile, death, belonging, literature, family, and religion. Furthermore, I move between Stevenson’s writing and present-day Samoan and Scottish perspectives on him and his work in order to explore a range of questions. In what ways does Stevenson and/or his work figure in the lives of contemporary Pacific Islanders and Scots? How is he remembered, and sustained, in Edinburgh and in Sāmoa? What is the role of place in these relationships with him and his writing? What is it that draws me, in particular, to Stevenson?