2016 journal article
Impersonating Islanders: Inauthenticity, Sexuality, and the Making of the Tahitian Speaker in 1770s British Poetry
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY-THEORY AND INTERPRETATION, 57(3), 343–363.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
5. Gender Equality
(Web of Science)
Source: Web Of Science
Added: August 6, 2018
The first Polynesian to set foot in Britain was a man we now know as Mai. He arrived in 1774 aboard the H. M. S. Adventure, one of the ships from James Cook’s second Pacific expedition, and stayed for two years, during which time he toured London’s drawing rooms, was presented at court, dined with Samuel Johnson, and was painted by Joshua Reynolds.1 His presence— and Oceanic exploration generally— inspired frenzied publication, as authors and printers capitalized on a “craze” for the Pacific.2 In this article I examine a segment of that publishing craze by focusing on two related clusters of approximately a dozen poems from the 1770s that impersonate Tahitians. The first cluster consists of satires in Mai’s voice composed by British authors while he resided in England. The second set was written from the perspective of Purea, a Tahitian noblewoman and contemporary of Mai, addressed to British explorers who had visited Tahiti and had supposedly become her lovers. Nearly all of them were published anonymously. They were humorous and comedic; they trafficked in gossip and innuendo about public figures such as the amateur botanist Joseph Banks, who traveled in Cook’s first Pacific expedition. Scholars, many of whom I engage with here, have typically seen these poems as mediocre satires of aristocratic excess and libertinism or as vulgarizations of the otherwise more sophisticated debate about Enlightenment, primitivism, sexuality, and exploration. While such critics have usefully integrated these poems into the vast scholarship about eighteenthcentury European encounters with the Pacific, they have also overlooked the significance of impersonation and virtualization for these poems. This oversight has meant sacrificing an important archive for understanding the consequences of print’s ability to imitate voices and construct virtual beings. Such an ability is particularly salient for understanding these impersonations because, as Srinivas Aravamudan ar-