ABSTRACT
From Caliban through Kurtz to Huxley’s John, savages have walked uneasily through the history of European colonialism. Yet it is not at all clear what they accomplished for, and in, various colonial enterprises. Indeed, this cannot be clear because, as Bernard Smith first suggested a half-century ago, the savage is not a uniform creature but a shifting and shifty reflection of evolving agendas that were contested between different groups of colonizers and ‘natives.’2 Nor is it self-evident how discourses of savagery were created, received, modified or set aside. Savagery is a loose cluster of strategies and tactics: a modern response not only to the primitive but to modernity itself, and a process of self-representation by the primitive whose ‘modern encounter’ proceeds in tandem with the ‘savage encounter’ of the civilized. It is a method and a rhetoric of control, resistance and liberation. While it has broad relevance across post-Columbian colonial encounters, savages are also highly specific to particular encounters, such as the British colonization of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. I use the word ‘encounter’ to indicate relationships, however fleeting, between Europeans and ‘natives’ that generate in the former a self-consciousness of ‘Western civilization.’3 By looking closely at the facets of an encounter and unpacking its particular
arrive at a better understanding of how colonizers – in their diversity – negotiate the worlds of the colonized.
