Masks of Difference

Writings about and depictions of 'savage' peoples by conquering races are here examined as a form of textual practice. What emerges is a composite picture of anthropological representation as a textual genre in its own right, embracing literature, literary theory and colonial/postcolonial studies.

---

David Richards here examines historical anthropological discourse - specifically writings about and depictions of 'savage' peoples by conquering races - as a form of textual practice. He analyses various kinds of 'naturalistic' representations, both artistic and literary, of colonised cultures, revealing the ways in which such representations betray their own subject-positions and fail - from our modern perspective - to act as the objective 'mirrors on nature' that they might originally have purported to be. Masks of Difference provides original and informative readings of individual sites of colonisation, including Florida (1564–91), and Scotland (1814), together with extended surveys; what emerges is a composite picture of anthropological representation as a textual genre in its own right, embracing literature, literary theory, and colonial/postcolonial studies.