ANG 3.

8 Visitants
CM01 additional notes
Exoticising Melanesia

Introducing the idea of Melanesia, which is set up in contrast to Polynesia: in the crudest
terms – in the history of European (and Polynesian?) imaginings, the lighter-skinned
Polynesians are contrasted favourably with darker-skinned Melanesians. The erotic exotic of
Polynesia is replaced by the savage exotic of Melanesia. In the place of youthful Polynesian
women or vahines, you get the equally stereotypical Melanesian savage or cannibal.

First, let’s review some of the history of the very idea of “Melanesia”

Early European encounters in Pacific (late 16th - 17th – early 18th C) produced no real
typologies of people. Variations in skin colour noted, for example, but not classified or linked
to other differences in any systematic way.

This begins to change during the 18th C – hence Cook, writing of people of Malakula in
what’s now Vanuatu, described them as

Almost black or rather a dark Chocolate colour, Slenderly made, not tall, have
Monkey faces and Woolly hair… this Apish nation… are rather a Diminutive Race
and almost as dark as Negros, which they in some degree resemble in their
countenances… Their [sic] hair is short and curled, but not so soft and wooly as
Negros

Georg and Johann Reinhold Forster, who travelled with Cook, identified what they saw as a
fundamental break between the brown or yellow and the black “types” or “races”, writing of

Two great varieties of people in the South Seas… two pronounced types… the black
race and the yellow race

But even this sharply drawn distinction was not really the “race” of the 19th and early 20th
centuries.

French savants generate increasingly rigid typologies – culminating in Dumont d’Urville’s

famous division of Oceania into four parts in 1832: Australia, Polynesia [“many islands”],
Melanesia [“black islands”] and Micronesia [“small islands”]
So before the early 19th century, it’s anachronistic to speak of Polynesia or Melanesia – not
terms used locally by Pacific Islanders, or even categories through which they represented
themselves (though that now happens – “The Melanesian Way”, “Melanesian Spearhead
Group”, “Polynesian Airlines”, etc.).

Beach in Polynesian (and Island Melanesian) encounters replaced in New Guinea by

obsession with the interior of this “monster island”.

Delayed encounters – 1770s for much of island Pacific, but 1870s for first interior
exploration, and encounters with major populations in New Guinea Highlands not until 1920s
and 1930s, through up until the 1960s and 1970s for some smaller and more remote
communities.

Contrasting imagery of Melanesians and Polynesians confirmed and endlessly repeated in

texts – travel accounts, novels etc.

Beatrice Grimshaw, for whom Melanesia:

comes to stand for darkness, danger, evil, cannibalism (and perhaps the darkest
menace of all – the sexuality of the black man). [Jolly 108]

And Frances Flaherty, who contrasted ‘the cannibal blacks as hideous as they come’ of the
New Hebrides [Vanuatu] with the Polynesians, who ‘are exactly like us’.

Turning to the very popular US magazine National Geographic, as for Polynesia, we find
Melanesia represented above all by the figure of the Melanesian man, often in close up, to
emphasise male finery and self-display – frequent references to “proud” men “preening” and
“primping” themselves. Melanesian women shown as labourers, or sometimes as “odd”
mothers, suckling baby pigs along with their own children.

National Geographic coverage emphasises two key themes for Melanesia:

1. ‘an area of violence, taboo, and danger or adventure

2. a land out of time, the Stone Age area par excellence’

Captions particularly expressive:

 Ghoulish mud man… macabre dance… eating voraciously [code for cannibalism]…
guttural language… [entire land living under the] dark terrors of ignorance

In many ways, as a US magazine presuming itself to be speaking to a (largely white) US

readership, National Geographic is picking up on the old analogy between Melanesians and
African Negros, and speaking to the fundamental North American fear of black skin.

Polynesian difference from Europeans is

• ambivalently represented
• alternately Other / different or “white”
• also a threatening and transgressive ambivalence, ultimately portrayed as unhealthy
for Pacific Islanders and for whites

By contrast, Melanesians are unambiguously different, “other”

Polynesia Melanesia
Appearance Clothed / robed Naked
Status Civilised Savage
Difference from Ambivalent Unambiguous (utterly other)
Europeans (alternately white / other)
Treatment of women Venerated Debased
Sexual tension White men: Polynesian White women: Melanesian men
Women
Settings Beach idyllic Dark interior (for New Guinea)