ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex relationship between the Anglo observer and the subject that it exposes. It considers the postcolonial conversation around the representation of Native figures by offering considerations of the role of late eighteenth-century British theatrical culture. The lack of sophistication in the expression and technology of the indigenous inhabitants of the South Pacific was again placed firmly within the hierarchical framework of British colonialism. Michael Gaudio has written about technology and colonialism in his book Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization, which is an important contribution to the scholarship. He argues that contemporary engravings of late sixteenth-century Carolina Algonquians not only functioned as ethnographic records of primitive people, but that the very process of making these images reflected a desire to widen the cultural gap between the technologically advanced Europeans and the technologically poor “savages".
