Noble Savage Research Articles

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World The Good Savage – Rousseau

The Noble Savage is an idealized concept of the uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization. It is a romantic conception of a man enjoying a natural and noble existence until civilization makes him a slave and corrupts him. John the Savage is the son born of parents from the Brave New World, but raised in the Savage Reservation, John represents a challenge to the dystopia. He is the character closest to being the hero of the novel. John is labelled a savage in Brave New World because he rejects society’s values and prefers to live as people did in older times. Even though he rejects the society tells him is civilized John is closest in mindset and experience to what we consider civilized today. John is the only character in the novel burn naturally of a mother, as opposed being born in a laboratory from a test-tube procedure. John maintains a familial relationship with his mother, while the other characters never know their parents. John reads Shakespeare as a hobby, while the other characters use drugs and sex as their only sources of recreation. And finally, once in London, John abhors society and claims that freedom and individuality should never be sacrificed for the sake of stability.

Predator's Prey: Reframing indigenous representation and Hollywood franchise cinema in the age of SVOD

AbstractHulu's Prey (2022), the fifth installment of the Predator franchise, is set in 1719 and features a Comanche female protagonist. The setting is unlike the 1987 Predator and its sequels, with their hardbody machismo and conservative politics. We argue that Prey is a small but significant step in Hollywood, but its inclusivity comes at a price. Though praised as progressive, it perpetuates a worldview in which Native Americans are ‘noble savages’ and processes of colonial dispossession are framed as quasi‐natural occurrences. Prey provides clues on the future of franchises in terms of how minority histories and subjectivities are represented.

A British Colonizer in Pages of ‘Le Petit Journal’ Newspaper

The article is dedicated to the study of the image of the “Other” colonizer, the British, who were rivals of France in the colonial race. The methodology proposed by Edward Said is used. For the first time in the history of the study of colonial empires, research is based on the construction and analysis of the image of the rival in colonial expansion, based on materials from the French press. One of the most popular newspapers of the Third Republic of the late 19th century, “Le Petit Journal”, served as material for the study. Notes devoted to British presence in India, the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882, the Fashoda Crisis, the Anglo-Boer Wars, the “Great Game”, influence in China, and others are considered. The concepts that formed the image of the “Other” colonizer for France are analyzed. The article describes the notions of “exploitation” and “cruelty of colonization”, the image of the “noble savage”, opposition “civilization — barbarism”, subjectivity, as well as personal qualities of the “Other” colonizer, such as British rejection of human rights and private property, which formed the construct of the “Other” colonizer. In conclusion, it is concluded that creating this image of the “Other” colonizer contributed to promoting France’s own ideas of colonization.

Giordano Bruno e la civiltà europea

According to Fulvio Papi, Giordano Bruno defends European culture by countering the “myth of the noble savage”, fuelled, in the modern age, by the discovery of America and supported, among other things, in Montaigne’s reflections on cannibals. However, Bruno’s is a “moderate Eurocentrism” which not only condemns the violence of the conquistadores, but is also based on a primitive idea of progress: all beings, in fact, are equal from an ontological point of view, since they are born through spontaneous generation, but only human beings, even the savages of the New World, can and must, thanks to manual industriousness, move from nature to civilization, of which European one is the model, however improvable. It is therefore in metaphysics and in the relationship between matter and form that, for Papi, the reasons for Bruno’s conception of European civilization must be sought.

Re-Evaluation of the Barbarian and the Primitive in the (Pre) Avant-Garde

The heteroimage of the Southeast European semiperiphery was subjected for centuries to geopolitical stereotypes of the Slav, either as a noble savage, as in the works of Fortis and Herder in the 18th and 19th centuries, or as a political “powder keg”, as a Balkan barbarian in more recent perspective. In such a geopolitical imaginary, the Balkans were perceived (described) primarily negatively, representing not only an Oriental Other, but above all a European semi-Other, a barbaric and primitive “Other within” (Todorova). The image of the “noble savage” in the exotic vision, which sets the world in binary oppositions, is used and reinterpreted by the artists of the (pre) Avant-Garde. The movement's inherent impulse to resist and re-evaluate traditional aesthetics, history and institutions, as well as to transgressively redefine both the instances of authorship and the criteria for creating and evaluating artworks, is evident in the way barbarism and primitivism are used as counterparts to the bourgeois normative value system. Their artistic texts and performances have an inherent orientation towards the primitive and the barbaric, which are traditionally presented in opposition to Western culture and civilisation, i.e. the politics of globalisation. At the level of artistic transgression, this transposed “otherness” is treated as a dialogical opponent, an object of fascination and identification, and a site of appropriation of time. This article deals with the way the primitive and the barbaric were treated in the Yugoslav avant-garde, either in some collective undertakings (Zenitism, Surrealism) or in individual creations (Ujević, Krleža). This topic will be addressed in three steps: 1. in the context of reflections on literature as a response to geopolitical prejudices (stereotypes); more specifically, in the concepts of the centre (especially Eurocentrism), civilisation and primitivism; 2. in a consideration of the use of primitivism, barbarism and bohemianism as expressions of aesthetic and public (political) resistance to regulated social practises and value systems; 3. an interpretation of these phenomena in the context of either imaginary or actual literary and social transformations.

Att lära av ”den Andra”?

Learning from “The Other”? Transformative learning in Swedish high school students’ narratives from an educational trip to Kenya. The study explores transformative learning in a group of Swedish high school students’ shared narratives about an educational trip to Kenya. The understanding of transformative learning is inspired by a discourse analytical approach, which emphasizes the use of discursive frameworks and repertoires for making sense of experiences. The analysis shows that the participants express a desire to learn from ‘the Other’, which is associated with a critical examination of their own ways of thinking. Moreover, the image of ‘the other’ is complex. On the one hand, it is constructed as a generalized image of the exotic other and reproduces notions of ‘the noble savage’. On the other hand, the image of ‘the other’ is also framed by a liberal discourse of individualism and tolerance. Finally, the narratives also entail constructions of similarity, which indicates a more radical renegotiation of previous discursive frames and blurs the borders between us and them.

Historical Roots of Neopaganism

The article considers the philosophical and culturological prerequisites for the emergence of neopaganism in Western Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It consistently outlines the history of neopaganism starting with the Renaissance, when the images of pagan gods became the pictorial embodiment of advanced humanistic ideas. Devoid of religious content as yet, they were already familiar to the educated people of Western Europe. The age of Enlightenment saw the myth of the Dark Ages being developed and popularized, directly linked with Christianity and Christian culture by Enlightenment philosophers in their works. At the same time, the image of a “noble savage” as an incarnate holder of virtues, Christian by nature, and yet emphatically deprived of the Christian religion and upbringing, was developing in literature. In the 19th century this was superimposed by the evolutionist theory of the emergence of religions, from the standpoint of which Christianity became only one of the forms that satisfi ed basic and universal human needs. A signifi cant contribution was also made by the concept of primordialism, which considered the people as a kind of ethnocultural historical constant. Within this approach, Christianity could be discarded without any signifi cant loss for culture, as values and virtues would not suff er from this, and the people would still comprise the same ethnocultural unity. Such ideas became the philosophical and culturological basis for the emergence of neopaganism. The upheavals of the twentieth century created the impetus for the emergence of the fi rst neopagan organizations. Many contemporaries considered world wars, the spreading urbanization and globalization as the inevitable consequence of the Christian-type development. The idea of returning to paganism became an attractive alternative for the part of the Western European society that was burdened by the processes of the twentieth century, The article also considers the origin and the emergence of neopaganism in Russia. It could be characterized by the same philosophical and cultural prerequisites as the one in Western Europe, but emerged with a certain historical lag. In addition, the Russian neopaganism had the ideological background of the communist propaganda as its important and striking distinguishing feature. The Christian images and meanings of the Russian traditional culture were either hushed up or openly replaced by pagan ones, as more suitable for the tasks of building a bright communist future. The knowledge of the described historical prerequisites will allow one to better understand both neopaganism itself and many related phenomena of the modern times.

“Beastly Customs” and a “Prodigious Nuisance”: A Revision of the Noble Savage in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge

no presenta resumen

Presence in the Book

Presence in the Book Gerald Vizenor (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Native dream songs are forever in the clouds, and once more the empire wars are underway. The lilies and daffodils are in bloom, and at the same time we hark back to the stories of shamans that war never ends, since evil, envy, greed, and predatory vengeance never end. The last empire war started with a royal murder, and the next world war of resentments and revenge starts with the fiery purge of books and libraries. —Gerald Vizenor, Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade (2020) "I AM IN THE BOOK," pronounced Edmond Jabès in The Book of Questions. "The book is my world, my country, my roof, and my riddle. The book is my breath and my rest. . . . I have followed a book in its persistence, a book which is the story of a thousand stories as night and day are the prow of a thousand poems. I have followed it where day succeeds the night and night the day, where the seasons are four times two hundred and fifty seasons," wrote Jabès. Native American authors are in the book and reveal the trouble and timely tease of books, or as Jabès commented, "the torment of the books." Natives are in three leagues of torment in the books, as the misnamed natives of discoverers, colonists, and counterfeit histories, the grandeur of the noble savage, and the critical tease and creative literary art by native authors. The gossip theories of race and betrayals of nations were denounced in the first books by native authors in the eighteenth century, and later ethnographic monographs were rightly mocked, and the rush of cultural models were deconstructed as ironic native stories of survivance. Cristoforo Colombo misnamed natives the Indians, and Amerigo Vespucci described natives as "worse than heathens; because we did not see that they offered any sacrifice, not yet did they have a house of prayer." Puritan John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared natives "enclosed no land, neither have they any settled habitations, nor any tame cattle." Critical literary memories are the future of books, the very nature and presence of printed books in the familiar world of libraries, timely ironies, and poetic perceptions of the colophon, deckle edge, and cover art. The reminiscences of printed books are not present in the future tense of computer technology or the algorithms of [End Page 43] artificial intelligence. The primary perceptions of the actual books are hardly realized on the internet or ebook readers. Click for larger view View full resolution "The books have voices. I hear them in the library," wrote Diane Glancy in Designs of the Night Sky. "I know the voices are from the books. Yet I know the old stories do not like books. Do not like the written words. Do not like libraries. The old stories carry all the voices of those who have told them. When a story is spoken, all those voices are in the voice of the narrator. But writing the words of a story kills the voices that gather in the sound of the storytelling. The story is singular then. Only one voice travels in the written words. One voice is not enough to tell a story. Yet I can hear a voice telling its story in the archives of the university library. I hear the books. Not with my ears, but in my imagination. Maybe the voices camp in the library because the written words hold them there. Maybe they are captives with no place else to go." Almost Browne, a native philosopher, always heard more than the voice of the author in a book. He heard the traces of dream songs, the seasons of hearsay, and the crowds of natives who created, enhanced, and mocked the books in libraries. Almost was born in the back of a rickety station wagon almost on the White Earth Reservation. Almost "signed and inscribed books in the name of Jesus Christ, Vine Deloria, Crazy Horse, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare" in the trickster novel Chair of Tears. "Many book buyers were curious about the...

For fear of the Other: Simulation of Indigenous presence in horror fiction

The following article examines the portrayal of Indigenous peoples and traditions in modern horror fiction written by non-Indigenous Euro-American authors. While the figures of the noble savage, beautiful maiden and victim of white progress are some of the most enduring stereotypes associated with indigeneity, in this article I demonstrate how in modern horror Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil, which the White protagonists need to defeat to ensure their own survival. If any Indigenous characters appear in these narratives, they do so mostly in the roles of helpers, which contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous characters in the genre. To illustrate these problems, I draw examples from a number of horror stories ranging from classic to pulp fiction in order to expose the genre’s latent colonial rhetoric, which reinforces the simulation of Indigenous presence in contemporary culture – a phenomenon analysed by the Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor, whose work will provide a theoretical background for my investigation.

Outside the imagined community: Pashtun subjects in contemporary Pakistani cinema

ABSTRACT In Pakistani cinema or Lollywood, the Pashtun subject is pejoratively represented as either the noble savage, the violent Islamist, the vengeful patriarch, the paedophile, or the simple-minded buffoon. Such representations are grounded in colonial discourse and in post-9/11 national and transnational political discourse, which is then inflected by historical legacies of Punjabi majoritarianism. Cinematic renditions play a critical role in depicting Pashtun subjectivities as excluded from the imagined community of the nation and the national body politic and re-affirm the hegemony of certain identities at the expense of other minoritarian identities. In this paper, I will focus on three popular contemporary Pakistani films – Khuda kay Liye (2007), Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (2015), and Karachi Se Lahore (2015) – in order to argue for the co-option of the national cinematic apparatus to construct a Pashtun/Punjabi binary where Punjabi identity functions as a placeholder for Pakistani national identity and the Pashtun is strategically expunged from the national imaginary as a balm to the nation’s extant anxieties relating to the presence of local and global terrorism in the region, the centre’s inability to consolidate a collective cultural and national identity and the persistence of ethnic inequality in Pakistan.

“Blessed Idlers” or “Indolent Loafers”: the Stereotype of Crimean Tatar Laziness in Russian and Foreign Mind in the Late of the 18th and 19th Centuries

This paper discusses the origin and evolution of the stereotype of “laziness” of the Crimean Tatars, which appeared in Russian and foreign travel writings from the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been shown that this stereotype was a product of Western “armchair” knowledge of the Enlightenment, which produced the ideas of “terrestrial paradise” in faraway countries where lived the “noble savages”. Applying it to what was seen in the Crimea, the writers and scientists ignored the specificities of Muslim ethics and political-economic developments in the region. The reflections on the Crimean residents were sometimes influenced by subjective circumstances, such as conflicts with Tatars concerning the possession of land properties. The stereotype of “Tatar sloth” quickly established itself in public mind. It had real political consequences, as it influenced the actions of the government and private persons. Perhaps this stereotype was among the reasons why the integration of the Crimea into the Russian empire took a very long time.

De/Colonial Boundaries, Cultural Difference and Shared Indigeneity in the Poem “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech” by Maḥmūd Darwīš

Abstract Simultaneously addressing the (Native) American and Palestinian/Israeli context, Maḥmūd Darwīš’s poem Ḫuṭbat al-Hindī al-aḥmar – ma qabla al-aḫīra – amāma al-raǧul al-abyaḍ (The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man), published in 1992 to critically commemorate the ‘discovery’ of ‘America’ by Columbus in 1492, is a deep reflection about the violence of borders and frontiers created by white European invaders. In my article, I aim to answer the question of how the poem’s manifold boundaries (between colonizer and colonized; nature and culture; equality and hierarchization; the living and the dead; identity and otherness) are addressed and re-framed. Although partly essentializing cultural difference by drawing from a romanticized image of the “noble savage” (the “Red Indian”), the poem nevertheless finds a voice to raise crucial questions regarding the self-perception of European/western modernity, anticipating the recently discovered fact that (white) human agency has pushed ‘progress’ so far as to enable humanity to destroy itself, nature, and earth. In intertextual dialogue with key texts of de/coloniality and western modernity, I attempt to show how the poem confronts us with fundamental questions about humanity in the face of self-destruction.

Ethnic mobilities and representations in Rose-Marie on stage and screen

This article interrogates representations of ethnicity in the long-lived musical play Rose-Marie from 1924, with music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, book by Otto Harbach, and lyrics by Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, and its subsequent MGM film adaptations in 1936 and 1954. The story is set in Canada, and images of Indigenous people include white-created tropes of children of nature, vicious savages and drunkards. These views are manifested aurally through Indianist musical tropes of the time, and are especially evident in ‘Indian Love Call’ and ‘Totem-Tom-Tom’. Whiteness is performed opposite portrayals of Indigenous people that range from the ‘noble savage’ of the famous ‘Indian Love Call’ to Wanda, a First Nations woman characterized as violent and over-sexualized in the 1924 and 1954 versions. Friml’s multifarious score includes recognizable Indianist tropes of the time as well as quintessential operetta and musical comedy fare, thus musicalizing cultural differences through established Eurocentric means. In Rose-Marie, the title character’s mobile ethnicity shifts from being presumably French-born French Canadian in the original to English Canadian in the 1936 film (starring Jeanette MacDonald) and French Canadian in the 1954 version (starring Ann Blyth). Although Rose-Marie and Wanda behave in similar ways, Rose-Marie’s singing whiteness allows her to become a romantic lead, whereas Wanda, whose dance-dominated performance mode emphasizes a sensual physicality, is vilified because of her ethnic heritage.

Dickens and the Noble Savage

Dickens and the Noble Savage

The Influence of the Concept of "Noble Savage" in Political Philosophy. Freedom and Social Organization from the Perspective of the Utopia of Primitive Society

The Influence of the Concept of "Noble Savage" in Political Philosophy. Freedom and Social Organization from the Perspective of the Utopia of Primitive Society

Genocidal Jesting

In the nineteenth century, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote best-selling works that shaped popular perceptions of Native American men. Historians and literary scholars have argued that literary characters representing Native men can be classified into two broad categories: Noble Savages and Bloody Savages. This article examines the literary origins and emergence of a third figure: the Comic Indian. Beginning with the various parodies of Longfellow’s Hiawatha in 1855, and continuing through the western humor of Bill Nye, this article examines how writers crafted comic characters that burlesqued stereotypical Native Americans. By the end of the century, the Comic Indian had become standard fare in U.S. literature. Understanding this history helps to explain why certain comic caricatures of Native men have persisted into the present and illustrates that humor can be used to justify genocidal policies.

Mücadele burada mı, ebediyette mi? Sherman Alexie'nin The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven romanı

Confined within the borders of reservations Native identity suffers not only from the traumatic experiences of poverty, unemployment, broken families, alcoholism and oppression but also from systematic racist practices and stereotyping, which reduce the American Indian identity to noble savages, bloodthirsty warriors, prophetic shamans, or drunken outcasts. In resistance to Anglo-American attempts to erase Native identity many American Indian writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor tried to preserve Native American tribal culture and history, and remedy the traumatized Native identity. This paper focuses on how Sherman Alexie in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, standing apart from other Native American writers, portrays the Spokane Indian reservation life with a critical and cynical viewpoint on contemporary Native American’s problems such as poverty, unemployment, hunger, drug addiction, alcoholism, and violence. The paper also discusses the insight Alexie brings to the Native identity problem through his critical reading of both the Native history/tradition and the white culture, and his critique of both the ‘positive’ and the negative stereotyping of the American Indian. The study is based on the premise that Sherman Alexie creates, borrowing from Homi Bhabha’s terms, an ‘interstitial space’ in his answer to the question: how will the Native identity be constructed, based on the American Indian tribal culture, or the dominant Anglo culture, or is there an alternative way?

How Nostalgia Drives and Derails Living with Wildland Fire in the American West

Representations of fire in the U.S. are often tinged with nostalgia: for unburned landscapes, for less frequent fires, for more predictable fire behavior, or for a simpler, more harmonious relationship between human communities and wildfire. Our perspective piece identifies four prevalent nostalgic figures that recur in popular representations of wildfire: the Giant Sequoia, the Heroic Firefighter engaged in “the Good Fight”, the Lone Frontiersman, and the “Noble Savage”. We assess the affordances and constraints of each of these figures for helping and/or hindering fire management. We consider how some forms of nostalgia position particular humans as heroes and fire as a villain, how others prioritize the communities that come together to face catastrophic fire events, and how some romanticize Indigenous burning practices. Drawing on knowledge from fire science, human geography, and the environmental humanities, we suggest that a more nuanced understanding of nostalgia can be useful for fire management and for finding healthier ways of living with more fire in the future.

The ‘stage Indian’ in early American theatre culture

The article deals with the early development of the ‘stage Indian’ as a character in early American drama and theatre. It studies ‘stage Indian’ characters, which reflect historical theatrical conventions rather than being historically accurate representations. It explores early plays depicting Native Americans as the ‘exotic other’. It considers plays involving the myth of the noble savage on the one hand and some parodying of this myth on the other. Finally, it describes various performances involving Native American performers in the United States in the 1890s. These examples show the diversity of the ‘stage Indian’ as a literary and performative construct.