Miscellaneous “primitive” and “savagery”/ “原始”与“野蛮“种种

[T]his great reservoir of moral, social, and physical pollution which is constantly extending its area and threatens to engulf with its filthiness and immorality the fairest portion of our city.

Depiction of San Francisco Chinatown (San Francisco Chronicle February 24, 1880).
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It was so easy to imitate these people. I learned to spit in the very first days. We used to spit in each other’s faces; the only difference was that I licked my face clean afterwards and they did not.

Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy” in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces (New York: Schocken books, 1948), 180.

Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs.

Ibid, 183.
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All complacency over his handiwork had vanished; never could he bring himself to exhibit to mortal eye these repulsive creatures. His only thought was the unanswerable question: what should he do with them? On this he brooded continually, reaching no conclusion because he could no more contemplate destroying creatures possessing human intelligence, however distorted and degraded, than he could have taken the life of a born idiot or one insane.

Louise J. Strong, “An Unscientific Story” The Cosmopolitan 34, no 4 (February, 1903), 414.

They were small, oblique, set closely together, of a heady black, their only lids being a whitish membrane that swept them at intervals—but they sparkled and glowed with passion, dimmed with tears, and widened with thought. Those eyes, more than a score of them, were fixed upon him now with entreaty, menace, fear, revolt, and, most of all, judgment burning in their depths. Even the smaller ones, of which there were many in various sizes, eyed him with resentment and hate, while scurrying, like frightened rats, from corner to corner as he moved about.

Ibid, 416.
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The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1988), 10. Quoted from Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press), 266.

William Schaefer, "Shanghai Savage" Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11.1 (2003) 91-133.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v011/11.1schaefer.html

不加按语了。相互关联当然是有。现在只是先列一个感兴趣的单子。当然，我的同情不是站在十九世纪和二十世纪初西方所自诩的“文明人”一边。我所同情的是被“文明人”所诋毁的“原始”、“野蛮”群体，以及他们是怎样被诋毁的。

© by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。