Lucy Liu

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Orientalism

From the book Orientalism by Edward Said. A discourse (meaning films, comics, books, stories, poems) which the Western culture (Europe and the US) uses to dominate, restructure, and have authority over the “Orient.”

Created Images

Using “Orientalism,” Europeans and Americans managed and produced images of people of the East which it could control. “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and underground self.”

Charlie Chan

Suzie Wong

Jackie Chan

Leonardo Nam

Said continues:

Orientalism suggests a will or intention to “incorporate what is a manifestly different world”This is exactly what American writers (missionaries, naval officers, and other explorers) did. They portrayed the Philippines and the Pacific Islands as full of people engaging in extremely “different” practices

Tattooing, Headhunting, and Cannibalism

Associated with cannibalism were two other things:

Headhunting

And tattooing

Why was it important to find cannibalism?

Either:To prove that the people on that Pacific Island were not as highly developed as Westerners and therefore it should be OK to exploit their resourcesOR to prove that they needed missionaries to come in and convert them to non-cannibal ways

Commander Wilkes on the Fijians:

So beautiful was the aspect of the islands that I could scarcely bring my mind to the realizing sense of the well-known fact, that they were the abode of a savage, ferocious, and treacherous race of cannibals.”

What does this allow Wilkes to do?

Hold Fijian royalty hostageBurn villagesWage war on one island – opened fire on the village, using rockets to destroy it, and killed at least 57 Fijians. The rest were forced to crawl on their hands and knees toward Wilkes to beg for mercy.

How is this “Orientalism”

Wilkes uses his words and the drawings of the Fijians to CREATE a South Pacific (sp. Fiji) in the consciousness of the American people which would allow exploitation and domination.

American Imperialism, Tattooing, Head-Hunting, and Cannibalism

United States Exploring Expedition under Captain Wilkes

Wilkes claims part of Antarctica, then on to Samoa

The Marshall Islands and Tonga

Bowditch Islanders

Moorea

Philippines

Manila

Luzon

Herman Melville responds

In the mid-19th century (1800’s), Herman Melville first was on a whaling ship, which he hated. He jumped ship on Nukuheva and wrote a book about that experience, called Typee, his first book. Later, he wrote the “Great American Novel,” Moby-Dick. Both are about cannibals and tattoos, but end up opposite of Wilkes.

Typee

The plot is that when Tommo (the hero) and his friend Toby jump ship on Nukuheva, they want to go inland so that the whaling captain and his mates can’t find them. They literally fall downhill into the valley of the Typees, whom they had been told were notorious cannibals.

Does “Typee” mean “lover of human flesh”?

That is the question Tommo keeps wanting to find out. He thinks that when he opens a cooking pot and sees “long pig,” that that is a euphemism for the body of the enemy.

Who is the cannibal?

Actually, what Melville does is to show that the real cannibal in the story is Tommo, who eats huge breakfasts of Poi, coconut, breadfruit, a small cake, two or three bananas, a Mawmee apple, an annuee, or other food, finished off by more coconut milk. He gets pork (a feast food) constantly.

Tommo doesn’t even walk

Because he has injured his leg, Tommo gets around by riding on the back of Kory-Kory for transportation.

When an interpreter arrives, the first thing he says (never thanking the people for anything) is an insult: He asks to leave the valley.

One contribution

The one thing Tommo does is to “fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably made to knock under to my superior prowess” – as if to underline that the Typees are not his enemies at all. Any cannibalism is in his imagination.

Taboos

Tommo violates every taboo in the valleyHands tobacco over a person’s headHandles women’s clothInsists that a female friend violate taboo by entering his canoe

Melville implies that like the snake in the Garden of Eden, the only evil in the valley is that brought by Tommo himself. He brings warfare and destruction to the peaceful valley

Finally

Tommo himself is pronounced to be “taboo”

Headhunting

“I forced my way into the midst of the circle and just caught a glimpse of three human heads, which others of the party were hurriedly enveloping in the coverings from which they had been taken.

Tattooing

Melville exactly describes tattooing just as we saw it in the videos last Thursday: using a shark’s tooth, tapped by a hammer-like piece of wood, which punctures the skin and charges it with the coloring.

He watches an artist

The artist was not at this time engaged on an original sketch, his subject being a venerable Typee, whose tattooing had become somewhat faded with age and needed a few repairs . . . He was . . . Touching up the works of the old masters of the Typee school, as delineated upon the human canvas before him.

Tommo refuses to be tattoed

As part of the warm welcome given by the Typees, they offered to tattoo him, starting with his face. He said they could do his arms, but even the King insisted that one’s face had to be done first, so he rudely refused, even though the tattoo artist kept pursuing him and begging hm.

Moby-Dick and the King of the Cannibal

By the time, about 8 years later, when Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he abandons the first-person narration of an idiot and chooses a narrator who falls in love with a tattooed, headhunting, cannibal, Queequeg.

Queequeg

Queequeg a headhunter

When Ishmael, the first-person narrator, meets Queequeg, he is quite worried because Queequeg walks in with his shrunken heads, which he has been trying to sell. “A peddler of heads, too – perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine – heavens! Look at that tomahawk!”

Queequeg’s the cannibal

Queequeg is definitely supposed to be a cannibal.One time he got an upset stomach from eating too many enemies too fast.“The excellent blood in his veins (he was royalty) was sadly vitiated by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth”

But we are all cannibals

“Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?” says Ishmael.He condemns hypocrisy: I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine . . . On the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand.

Love the cannibal

Queequeg’s tattoos and wildness: “those things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me”

Sacrifice

Ishmael is saved, in the end, because he finds a life buoy. It is Queequeg’s coffin, which he has made for himself and decorated with all the tattoos from his whole body. Queequeg had offered his body, “he would gladly die for me, if need should be.” Tattoos thus become a mark of self-sacrifice and salvation.

Melville’s final word

In the book after Typee, the hero calls himself “Typee,” or “lover of human flesh.

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael says that “I myself am a savage, owing no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals.”

So what was Melville doing?

ANTI-ORIENTALISM

Or Deconstruction of orientalism

Or Reconstruction of Cannibalism

Or Reconstruction of Tattooing

Or at least, some of the earliest Pacific-Islander-American literature