Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame: 5 (Asia Pacific Modern) - Tapa dura

"Tierney has demonstrated adequately an insightful argument sustaining the similarity between the experiences of non-Western and Western colonization." Bltn Of The Institute Of Chinese Literature & Philosophy "An invaluable window through which one can appreciate wide-ranging experiences and interpretations of colonialism in prewar and wartime Japan." World History Connected

"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. 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.