Going Troppo: Images of White Savagery, Degeneration and Race in Turn of the Century Colonial Fictions of the Pacific

Abstract

A major concern of studies of colonial cultures has been the ways in which the colonized other has been represented by the colonizers. There has been a recognition that colonial discourses - those ethnocentric and racial tales of ascent and progress through a hierarchy of civilizations - have represented colonial subjects in particular ways, justifying the relations of domination and exploitation that typify colonization. Increasingly, however, attention is being paid to the ways in which the colonizers themselves are imagined, in distinctive ways, with particular effects (see Cooper and Stoler 1989, 1997; Staler 1989a,b; and Thomas 1994).