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This chapter probes the intractable and controversial subject of national identity in Tudor Ireland. It offers an analysis of William Cecil's attitudes toward not only Ireland's Irish, or Gaelic, population, but also the two varieties of Englishmen resident in Ireland by the second half of the sixteenth century: the so-called ‘Old English’ and ‘New English’ populations. It argues that though Cecil viewed English culture as an example of ‘civility’ and Irish culture and society as inherently ‘savage’, circumstances compelled the minister to acquire a level of understanding of the latter.

This chapter discusses how the quest for civilization was renegotiated at a level of global peace discourse rather than national conflict. It explores the European and Anglophone context of reconstruction, and examines how modernism and classicism were important cultural sources for rebuilding civilization. In war and peace, classical ideals of civilization were mobilized: the chapter examines these longer traditions and the impact of war. Classicism in the Academy is considered, especially classics and anthropology — disciplines that framed debates about civilization during the war and ideals of rebuilding afterwards. The impact on modernism is also explored, especially the affect of ‘cultural nostalgia’ on representations of the body. Together, classics, politics, and medicine set the context whereby classical ideals could be rejuvenating. The longer history of European classicism — and anxieties about civilization — provides important background for why, after 1918, physical perfection, social regeneration, and western cultural renewal were imagined through both the classical and the modern in reconstructing the body.

Dufourmantelle discusses the character Piotr Stepanovich Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Devils as an inverted Christ figure. He embodies a gentleness of extreme savagery to the extent that he moves forward while exposing himself all the time, such as he is, openly transgressing laws and customs without any of the false pretences held by his contemporaries. Gentleness is the temptation of the executioner. Gentleness has always sheltered horror.

Chapter One reconstructs the life history of Te Ara, a Maori chief who led a massacre of the crew and passengers of the British ship Boyd in 1809 in retaliation for having been whipped by the ship's captain. The chapter shows, there was a remarkable effort, beginning around 1815, to represent Te Ara's vengeance as the understandable response of an upper-class man to the intolerable insult of a flogging. The true origin of the incident, according to most of the post-1815 commentators on the event, was not the “savagery” of Te Ara but the “imprudence and temerity” of the captain who whipped him.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and colonisable peoples. Whether depicted as noble savages attuned to the natural world or as wild peoples beyond the remit of civilization, to Britons the state of nakedness increasingly signified distance from civilization and reason. This chapter explores that linkage, firstly through eighteenth-century British representations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and then through an examination of British discourse concerning dance, where an explicit and often alarmed sexualization of the state of undress was paramount well into the twentieth century. This essay proposes, above all, that nakedness is not a simple description nor a state of being but a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to the generation of ideas regarding the British self and the foreign or colonial other in the British imperial context.

This chapter examines how Haiti functioned as the necessary element in early historical constructions. It evaluates how the two-sided nature of Haiti as alternately Black France and African Antilles helped delineate Western constructions of civilization and savagery. The chapter suggests that the business of being Haitian was more complex than most writerly representations of Haiti ever allowed, and also explains that the events in France have long been fixtures in Haiti's own political or literary storytelling.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to understand Japanese colonial culture by analyzing the tropes of savagery in literary works and exploring links between them and wider social discourses. An ancillary aim of the book is to place the Japanese empire within the comparative context of global imperial discourses and to initiate a dialogue with current postcolonial theory, which is so deeply informed by the study of European empire. The chapter then discusses the following: allegories of the self, violent savages and children of paradise, Japan in postcolonial studies, colonial mimicry and mimetic imperialism, the ambivalences of colored imperialism, the triangle of Japanese colonial discourse, and the rhetoric of sameness/similarity. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This concluding chapter examines tropes of savagery in the literature of the postwar period. Cannibalism features as a major theme in three prominent pacifist and humanistic novels that were published within ten years of Japan's defeat and the loss of its empire. By focusing on this theme, it examines continuities and discontinuities between tropes of savagery in the colonial era and in the immediate postcolonial period.

James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Oak Openings is examined thoroughly in this chapter. The novel looks at the fictional missionary life of Parson Amen. The novel, which was written during the Mexican War, rejuvenates the Puritan myth of American exceptionalism by illustrating an expansionist nation untrammeled by Europe's vices. The novel mainly explores the theme of beneficial Christianity in the conversion of the American Indian. The basic binary leading The Oak Openings is that of savagery versus civilization.

French Enlightenment writing about savagery, centered on America and Oceania, was centrally concerned with the relationship between property and inequality, while writing about despotism in Asia revolved around political centralization. The two literatures did not tend to intersect until they were synthesized by British, and especially Scottish, thinkers. Adam Ferguson, following the lead of Adam Smith, identified the division of labor as the motor of an ambivalent progress, expanding the horizons of the few while limiting those of the majority, imperiling democratic institutions and personal liberties. John Millar, his younger contemporary, developed his arguments even more systematically if somewhat more optimistically. In England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire pitted Roman civilization as delicately poised between the savagery of the Germans and the Oriental despotism of the Persians, liberty without order as opposed to order without liberty. His account was in many ways a metaphor for the predicament of modern Europe as he understood it.

In the units of the French civilians, for many, many hours, their electricity and water supply were cut off, and then the Vietnamese assaulted the French civilians in their private houses and took some 200 hostages. Many civilians had been armed by the Sûreté, and some of them are burned or harmed in horrible ways. These extremes were exploited to the maximum by French propaganda, which depicted Ho and Giap as directly responsible for the murder of French citizens. The Hanoi killings pushed the French myth of a generic Far Eastern racist savagery, which had found expression in the Japanese execution of all the French survivors after the battle for Langson on March 11, 1945, the rampage at the Cité Héraud in Saigon on September 24, 1945, where 120 Frenchmen were killed, and now the atrocities in Hanoi.

Discussing the Penan of Sarawak, this chapter explores cultural citizenship by triangulating among three viewpoints: The national—that of the Sarawak state and the Malaysian federal government; the local—that of the indigenous Penan; and the transnational—that of the Northern (European and American) environmentalists. The study delineates the asymmetrical perceptions and power relations among the three groups. Government officials hope to convert the Penan from what they see as their present state of savagery into citizens of the national community like themselves. They view the Penan as a remnant of the past and argue for strategies to transform, improve, and update them rather than, as they say, attempting to preserve Penan lifeways as if the Penan belonged in a museum.

Since the beginnings of Western scholarship in India, the figure of the blood-thirsty, violent, and explicitly sexual goddess Kālī appears to have held an especially central, but also ambivalent and disturbing, place in the colonial imagination. In the eyes of the early British colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars, Kālī was identified as the most depraved of all forms of modern popular Hinduism, the quintessence of the licentiousness and idolatry that had destroyed the noble, monotheistic spirit of the Vedas and Vedānta. This chapter argues that Kālī was conceived by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialists as the worst example of irrational Indian savagery. Such a reading of Kālī as the quintessential Other and the “extreme Orient” influenced Britons' dealings with the “Thugs” and led to the creation of a genre of Victorian novels centered on the lurid East. The chapter also discusses the strategies of appropriation and subversion used by Indian nationalists, who turned this Orientalist Kālī against her colonial creators in their own literatures and actions.

This chapter examines efforts in Bolivia by writers and activists who deliberately invoked and reappropriated “savagery” as a means of disrupting dominant forms of representation that naturalize the continuing violence of colonial social relations. It focuses on the period when Aymara intellectuals asserted themselves in the public sphere as activist reading and writing subjects dedicated to articulating alternative histories and identities. The chapter highlights the work of Fausto Reinaga, whose works were considered to be a form of lettered savagery.

This epilogue maintains that while “the Bosnian savagery” is quintessentially modern, it still partakes of a discrete kind of modernity that sets it apart from Western “liberal nationalism” and thus requires special explanation. It argues that scholars should suggest “solutions” to the situation in contemporary Bosnia, generally by establishing a consensus on conflicting historical claims, presenting proposals for reconciling Serb–Croat–Muslim parties, or creating a more stable political framework for the country. These solutions “stabilize the situation” in the long term and provide a relatively satisfactory answer to seething tensions in various multiethnic areas. Nation-making in this sense appears like a jigsaw puzzle. In this model, thousands of pieces, interlocking shapes, and particular physical constraints limit possibilities for movement and change.

This chapter explores the complex and even mutually constitutive relationship between humane reform and race relations in America at the end of the nineteenth century. In linking animality to savagery and blackness, it highlights the ways humane advocacy for animals can be and has been used as a way to further demonize already denigrated human groups. It shows how African Americans were often associated with “savagery,” rather than animality, and therefore were placed even lower than animals on a racist hierarchical scale of value. Such designation was used as a justification for the lynching of African Americans so rampant at the end of the nineteenth century: the same moment that the humane movement was born in the United States. Whereas whites were seen as capable of compassion and advocacy for animals, African Americans, as savage, were seen as incapable of such humane sentiment. In light of this distinction between “animal” and “savage,” the chapter argues that the notion of humane advocacy for animals produced devastating social and political effects in its foundational moment.