Sunday, May 22, 2011

How can I analyse Paul Gauguin's Tahitian series with reference to postcolonialism?

This question is very interesting to me because I have a foot each in the world of the colonizer (I'm American, half-white) and the colonized (My father is a native Filipino, born and raised there.  Also, I lived all of my childhood in Micronesia).  So questions of how the colonizers and the colonized relate to each other are interesting to me.


Personally, I do not think that these paintings by Gauguin show postcolonialism.  Instead, I would say that postcolonialists would criticize Gauguin's paintings.  They would say that his paintings are from the point of view of the colonizer.


Postcolonialism is supposed to show that colonized people are not all the same.  It is supposed to rethink the relations between the colonies and the colonizers.  But I think Gauguin's work stereotypes the colonized people he paints.


Gauguin's Tahiti paintings are all in a primitive style, as if emphasizing that the Tahitians were different from and less civilized than Europeans.  They also mostly show women and children, most of whom are at least partly naked.  To me, the nudity emphasizes that Tahitians are backward and invites us to think of them as sex objects.  In addition, I think that Gauguin's choice to only show women and children implies that Tahitians are not strong.


All of this is in line with colonialist ideas, not postcolonialist ones.

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