The Skin of Modernity: Primitivism and Tattooing in Literature.

Abstract

This dissertation locates the representation of the tattooed body in Euro-American modernist literature within a discursive genealogy that begins with the tattoos acquired at Tahiti in 1769 by the Endeavour crew during James Cook’s first Pacific voyage. This approach both reconfigures our understanding of how tattooing has been made to engage with notions of race, sexuality, criminality, and class and contests the atemporal nature of primitivist evocations of indigenous tattooing. The tattoo is an embodied trace that resignifies the conditions of its transmission into Euro-American culture. I examine Melville’s first novel Typee as an early example of the primitivist representation of Pacific tattooing in literature. In his beachcomber narrative, Tommo positions Marquesan tattooing as an incomprehensible semiotic system that can overwhelm western cultural signs. Beachcombers were the first Euro-Americans to display their tattooed bodies for profit; this project enters the modernist period through the sideshow and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. With the tattooed performer Nikka as a central figure, Barnes uses “freak show discourse,” which I define as the tension between the performative construction of the “freak” identity and the essentialization of bodily difference in the sideshow, to open the space for the characters’ imagined genealogies, counternarratives in which they are not contained by essentialist constructions. In the “Eumaeus” episode of Ulysses, I examine the intersections of tattooing, queer sexuality, and primitivism in the representation of the sailor D.B. Murphy. The primitivist lack of specificity in Murphy’s stories is intimately connected to the ambivalent sexualized signs that proliferate on and around him; the episode codes the tattooing operation itself as a homosexual experience. The project ends with a discussion of cultural exchange and appropriation in the context of Albert Wendt’s novel The Mango’s Kiss and the “contemporary tribal” tattoo designs of Leo Zulueta. “The Skin of Modernity” offers a broader understanding of primitivist appropriation in the modernist period and includes overlooked histories of encounter and exchange. No instance of appropriation exists without its evasions, elisions, disavowals, history, and genealogy. This dissertation traces such narratives.