The Aesthetic of Natives' Dress and Undress : Colonial Stereotype and Mimicry in Paul Gauguin's and William Somerset Maugham's Cultural Forms

Abstract

This paper shed light on the appropriation of the presence or absence of sartorial habits in colonised subjects in French and English cultural forms like those by Paul Gauguin and Somerset Maugham. It studied nakedness and half-nakedness as colonial stereotypes for the so-called primitivism and semi-primitivism of colonised people in the forms by Gauguin and Maugham. It also considered the presence of clothing in the colonial subject as a form of colonial mimicry. It showed that the ‘nakedness’ and ‘half-nakedness’ of a colonised people were metonymic tropes that referred to the reductive categories of ‘primitivism’ and ‘semi-primitivism’. As for the instances when the colonised subject was ‘dressed’, they were cases of colonial mimicry, i. e. the creation of the colonised people as the mimic persons of the colonisers; the native was created as the resemblance of the coloniser, but he was not completely the same. The anxious repetition of the expressions ‘naked’, ‘barefoot’ and other such expressions in the texts as well as paintings which transformed them into colonial stereotypes. With the colonial contact, the colonisers came to the encounter of people that were having their own ways, one of them being the fact of not covering themselves. Instead of trying to understand the reasons for this nakedness and its socio-cultural implications, the coloniser considered it as the very sign of their primitivism or semi-primitivism. Thus, by means of repeating this nakedness, its misunderstanding was expressed within colonial discourse and other Eurocentric cultural forms.