Jack London versus Melanesia

Scott Hamilton

Adelaide University scholar Mandy Treagus will be giving a talk called 'Jack London in the Solomon Islands: race, labour, & Melanesianism' on the 15th of October.

Anyone can watch the talk via Zoom using the following link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85211517526 

Jack London is one of the subjects of Treagus' new book The Pacific Tale: short fiction from 1890-1950, which has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. London helped create some of the enduring stereotypes of Melanesia. You may never have read stories like 'The House of Mapuhi' and 'Mauki', but his thoughts may have lodged in your head.

Famous in the United States & Europe for his socialism as well as his fiction, London sailed to the South Pacific in search of new material and encountered a series of indigenous societies that baffled and angered him. By stereotyping Melanesians as primitive savages he avoided having to deal with the implicit critique they offered of his view of the world and way of life.

London is only one in a long line of northern hemisphere socialists who have not been able to cope with the way the South Pacific confounds their theories. Although he was a critic of the inequality and cruelty of capitalism, he shared nineteenth century Europe and America's Orientalist view of the world. The young Karl Marx opened The Communist Manifesto with a paean to the power of capitalism's industrial revolution, mockery of the supposed 'idiocy and backwardness' of rural life, and praise for the way capitalism was transforming colonised societies like India. In a similar way, London was impressed by the colonial adventures of European powers and the United States, and liked to contrast the dynamism of the 'white' countries with the supposed 'fatalism' and 'stagnation' of Asia and other regions. Marx would eventually change his mind about the superiority of the West and the desirability of colonialism. London never did.

London's experiences of the South Pacific are captured in his book The Cruise of the Snark and in a series of short stories. He could not find states, stable hierarchies, and 'progress' in Melanesia, and thus concluded that the region was hopelessly 'backward'. Melanesia represented humanity's childhood. Only white-skinned outsiders with whips and guns could help it grow up.

And yet Melanesia had some of the first agricultural societies in the world. In the highlands and New Guinea crops were being planted and harvested at least ten thousand years ago. Melanesian peoples were able to come together to create monumental works like irrigation systems, terracing, and megalithic complexes, despite their lack of states or hereditary chiefs. And they made long journeys by sea to trade goods and songs and dances, like the kula journeys Malinowski made famous.

As archaeologist Tim Denham has noted, if Melanesia never had pharaohs and states and empires it was because Melanesian peoples decided to take another route through history. The late Dave Graeber's bestselling book The Dawn of Everything has made us more familiar with such choices, and with the diversity of pre-modern societies. Different peoples had different ideas of what counted as 'progress'.

London mistook decentralisation for lawlessness and cultural and linguistic diversity for chaos. The stereotypes in his stories became popular in the northern hemisphere and amongst settler peoples in Australasia, because they let people avoid thinking about a troubling otherness. Today Melanesia still presents an alternative way of thinking and being.

The shadow of nineteenth century northern hemisphere prejudices still falls in surprising places, as I pointed out in this open letter to Auckland's war Memorial Museum.

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