Tropics of Savagery

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Tropics of Savagery

The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame

Linguistics Asian history

Author: Robert Thomas Tierney

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Collection: Asia Pacific Modern

Language: English

Published by: University of California Press

Published on: 20th May 2010

Format: LCP-protected ePub

Size: 886 Kb

ISBN: 9780520947665


Introduction

Tropics of Savagery is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of "savagery" in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized.

Key Themes

By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period—violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.

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