Melville’s “Porno-Tropics”: Re-Sexuating Pacific Encounters
Melville’s “Porno-Tropics”: Re-Sexuating Pacific Encounters
This chapter presents three narratives of Herman Melville—Typee: A Romance of the South Seas, Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas, and Mardi and a Voyage Thither—to discuss the fantasmatic elements in antebellum maritime narratives that shape the representation of the Polynesian women. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly’s Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific—a collection that reframes male fantasies by focusing on cross-cultural exchanges of sexualities—states that there is a contemporary trend seeking to move past both a delimiting “fatal-impact” thesis of cultural contact and a broader impasse between universalist and relativist views of sexuality. The chapter studies the Lacanian theory of sexuation to explore aspects of Polynesian sexuality.
Keywords: Porno-Tropics, Polynesian women, Lenore Manderson, Margaret Jolly, Herman Melville, theory of sexuation, fatal impact, antebellum maritime narratives
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