Paul Lyons examines Herman Melville's Typee,
demonstrating ways in which, in shifting the focus from cannibals to his own
fear of being devoured, Melville critiques the discourse of cannibalism that
he saw circulating through early texts of Pacific exploration and exchange.
At several points during Typee, Melville refers to the central character,
Tomono, as having been 'consumed' by 'fearful apprehensions'. As Lyons
argues, 'the pun on "consume" makes literal the link between cannibalism and
fear', but Melville is trapped by his own critique, even as he attempts to
expose the ways in which the Euro-American gaze of this period seems almost
unavoidably held by a series of potentially phantasmal perception. Melville
manages as well to suggest some of the relays from the cultural to the
political, from Robinson Crusoe's imagined massacres of cannibals to the
actual loathing and massacre of cannibals in Wilke's narrative of the
American expedition. Lyons' chapter offers a powerful analysis of the ways
in which an author's own anxieties, in this instance, anxieties surrounding
cannibalism, can subtly influence the creative activities of observation
and writing.
The third section, entitled 'Captive White Bodies &
the colonial Imaginary in "Terra Australia", examines the emergence of
captivity narratives in Australia in newspaper reports, documentary accounts
and fiction. Youndh! A Tasmanian Aboriginal Romance of the
Cataract Gorge (1894), is an obscure novel which tells the story of a
white heiress kidnapped and raised by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In
Youndh a narrative ostensibly sympathetic to the situation of
Aboriginal people ultimately works to rep0lace them with 'better' versions
of themselves in a reconfigured landscape. the novel's elegiac treatment of
'Tasmanian peoples comfortably post-dates the period when they were regarded
as supposedly 'extinct' and by reinforcing this in its pseudo-historical
narrative, Youndh, for all its well-meaning rhetoric, is also
complicit in the ongoing dispossession and disavowal of Aborigines.
The next chapter examines the popular stories
surrounding the White woman of Gippsland. In December 1840, pioneering
settler Angus McMillan's sighting of a white female 'captive' among the
Kurnai in Gippsland appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. rumors of the
'captive' woman continued to surface periodically over the next few years
and in 1846 a public meeting was held in Melbourne and a publicly-funded
expedition was sent in quest of her. The imagined plight of a genteel,
Christian, white woman held in thrall by 'savages' provided the colonists of
Port Phillip with salacious reading, an opportunity for point-scoring
against the government and a pretext for heroic endeavour. Carr investigates
how anxieties about possession of the female body, cannibalism and
miscegenation, projected onto the Kurnal, fed racist views which validated
the expropriation of Kurnai land by European settlers and speculators. Her
discussion of the way in which racist discourses intersect with those of
gender offers a powerful way of re-reading the narrative of the Whit3e Woman
of Gipps Land.
Following is a chapter which examines the role of
material culture in stories about captivity. the history of the White Woman
of Gipps Land - the most fully documented captivity narrative of colonial
Australia - can be traced through expedition journals, official papers,
newspapers, fictional accounts and folklore. It can also be told through
objects the items of personal property listed in the Sydney
Morning Herald letter, the mirrors and handkerchiefs, bearing messages
for the white woman distributed throughout Gippsland, and the wooden ship's
figurehead of Britannia which was eventually located by one of the search
parties. The chapter explores the meanings of both European and Aboriginal
material culture in circumscribing the white captivity experience in
Australia through examining the use of objects and signs in the White woman
of Gippsland narrative and comparing it to a different set of objects
associated with the death of Mary Watson in colonial Queensland forty years
later. The next chapter examines the details of material culture -
signs too frequently overlooked in critical discourse - to offer a complex
and fascinating study of the popular colonial narrative of captive women.
The final section, 'Film, Desire & the Coloured
Body', explores the representation of colonial subjects in both documentary
and fiction films. Jeanette Hoorn examines Marlon Fuentes' documentary,
Bontox Eulogy, in which the director, through the strategies of
auto-ethnography, presents a narrative of his life as a Filipino living in
America. This present-day narrative is produced in relationship to the
taking of his grandfather Marcod from the Philippines and his display in the
Filipino pavilion of the St Louis World Fair, along with more than one
thousand other Filipino people. Representatives from a range of ethnicities
were exhibited according to a kind of evolutionary ladder, from what was
perceived to be the most primitive to the most civilised. the film uses
original footage from the period not only of the Filipino people on display
but also the so-called civilised Americans strolling through the villages of
the exposition subjecting the 'other' to a curious and superior gaze.
Fuentes uses melancholia as a trope for his narrative, painfully enacting
both his loss and that of the Philippines as an independent nation. through
a series of inversions of mainstream filmic, structures, he interrogates the
project of colonialism and its representation in popular culture as well as
the culture of the museum.
In a re-reading of Charles Chauvel's Jedda
(1955), Barbara Creed identifies the film as a stolen generation story told
through and disguised by the trope of a reverse captivity narrative. Creed
traces the film's interest in representing Jedda's captivity in the context
of a morality tale - the pastoralist family's quest to rescue Jedda from her
own people ('the dirty little monkeys') and transform her into a 'white'
girl in line with the controversial assimilationist policies of the day. The
second captivity story - a classic captivity narrative - is about Jedda's
abduction by Marbuk, a renegade Aborigine. As Jedda matures into a young
woman, she finds herself torn between two cultures. Her unspoken desire to
return to her own people is brought into sharp focus when she encounters
Marbuk, a 'rogue' male who is in trouble with his own people and with the
police, for stealing women. Sexually attracted to Marbuk, who is represented
in the film as an exotic black 'other', Jedda at first responds freely to
his overtures but then finds herself taken captive and forced to flee with
him into the bush. The film explores the theme of eroticism and sexual
captivity in relation to Jedda's ambivalent response to Marbuk's appeal. the
chapter argues that, although the ending of Jedda is problematic and open to
a number of interpretations, it nonetheless draws on the classic captivity
tale with its themes of sexuality and eroticism to cover over the story of
Jedda's original captivity and suffering as one of the stolen generation.
The history and current plight of the Korean
'comfort women' as depicted in such film texts as The Murmuring, in
the final chapter, documents the provision of comfort women for the Japanese
military forces stationed in the Pacific and on the Asian mainland during
World War II, involving the organisation and administration of an elaborate
network of 'comfort stations' over a vast area. the problem of the staffing
of these stations with adequate numbers of comfort women was solved by
resorting to the abduction, rape, incarceration and forced labour of women
of many different nationalities. This persuasively argued chapter explores
the personal, political and aesthetic issues involved in the representation
of this hitherto hidden history, after fifty years of silence, with
particular reference to documentary productions made in 'China, Korea, the
Philippines, Japan, New guinea and Australia. the story of the comfort women
is one of enduring shame - for their captors.
WELCOME EVERYBODY
- DOMAINS
Thank you so much for visiting the above five Domains. I am
very pleased to be able to share with you that further limited
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Pages within the above Domains, are now available. Potential
advertisers are cordially invited to choose from several thousand Web
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