Cannibal Cruising, or, "to the careful student of the Unnatural History of Civilization"

Charles Warren Stoddard's South Sea Idyls (1873) rank among those travelogues which—like Herman Melville's Typee—take A Peep at Polynesian Life. In his mock cannibal tales, Stoddard unsettles fixed dichotomies like civilized/savage, natural/unnatural, Western/non-Western. My argument will...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Amerikastudien 2001-01, Vol.46 (1), p.71-85
Main Author: Poole, Ralph J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Fear
Friendship
Homosexual relationships
Homosexuality
Male homosexuality
Narratives
Narrators
Polynesian studies
Queer culture
Travel
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Summary:Charles Warren Stoddard's South Sea Idyls (1873) rank among those travelogues which—like Herman Melville's Typee—take A Peep at Polynesian Life. In his mock cannibal tales, Stoddard unsettles fixed dichotomies like civilized/savage, natural/unnatural, Western/non-Western. My argument will be that Stoddard's travel sketches not only constitute a heterotopic space of queerness within the discursive field of Orientalism,' but point toward a more general shift of paradigms occurring with the intrusion of the European sexological theories into American cultural consciousness.
ISSN:0340-2827