The trope of the Native American in nineteenth-century British and American accounts of South East Asia

ABSTRACT

The nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of Western colonial power and influence across both mainland and maritime South East Asia, along with the publication of a growing number of books about the region and its peoples by Western scholars, travellers and colonial administrators. This was also a time when pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference were rife and deemed respectable in Western academic and political circles. This article looks at how some British and American authors were inclined to examine South East Asians through the lens of racial theory, and how in the course of doing so were also inclined to compare some South East Asian ethnic groups to the natives of America. In the course of doing so, Native Americans were invariably seen and cast as a homogenous racial group that was then located at the bottom of a hierarchy that differentiated between superior and inferior races. The repeated deployment of the trope of the Native American, as the embodiment of inferiority and savagery, was an instance of racial stereotypes being instrumentalized at a global level as part of a new pan-Atlantic Anglo-American discourse of race and racial difference.

KEYWORDS:

• South East Asia
• South East Asians
• colonial writings
• native stereotypes: native Americans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article elaborates upon themes that I have written about earlier in my work America’s Encounters with Southeast Asia 1800–1900: Before the Pivot (2018).

2 The fact that none of Marryat’s images of Dayaks included depictions of Dayak agriculturalists or fishermen tells us more about where his attention was focused at than about the Dayaks themselves.

3 It is also interesting to note that Skeat’s comparison of the Malays with Polynesians came from Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890, vol.1, 189).