Masks of Difference
Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art

Writings about and depictions of 'savage' peoples by conquering races as a form of textual practice.

David Richards (Author)

9780521479721, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 March 1995

364 pages, 19 b/w illus.
21.6 x 13.8 x 2 cm, 0.441 kg

David Richards here examines historical anthropological discourse - specifically writings about and depictions of 'savage' peoples by conquering races - as a form of textual practice. He analyses various kinds of 'naturalistic' representations, both artistic and literary, of colonised cultures, revealing the ways in which such representations betray their own subject-positions and fail - from our modern perspective - to act as the objective 'mirrors on nature' that they might originally have purported to be. Masks of Difference provides original and informative readings of individual sites of colonisation, including Florida (1564–91), and Scotland (1814), together with extended surveys; what emerges is a composite picture of anthropological representation as a textual genre in its own right, embracing literature, literary theory, and colonial/postcolonial studies.

Introduction
1. The satyr anatomised: Venice 1570
2. Identity and its others: Florida 1564–91
3. The lovers of Paramaribo: Surinam 1663–1777
4. Making history: Scotland 1814
5. 'Do they eat their enemies or their friends?' Cambridge and Bugunda 1887–1932
6. Causes célèbres in the myths of modernism: Melanesia and Brazil 1895–1970
7. Third eye/evil eye
8. Different masks
9. Masks of difference
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]