“A Little God of His South Sea”: Queer Exoticism in the Decadent Pacific

This essay explores the convergence of Decadence, queer sociality, and Pacific imagery in the work of American travel writer Charles Warren Stoddard and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. For these writers, the “South Seas” seemed to epitomize a prelapsarian sexual innocence, exempted (at least provisionally) from capitalist calculations of value and the impositions of Victorian bourgeois morality. As such, the Pacific furnished a shared imaginary in which they could articulate transgressive homosocial intimacies, both with each other and with others in their bohemian circle. But these expressions of queer, cosmopolitan kinship also depended on well-worn stereotypes about native decline, in which Indigenous peoples were seen to embody an irrecoverable past—one doomed to disappear in the onward march of modernity. Drawing on postcolonial conceptions of extinction discourse and Indigenous agency, this essay will thus contend with one potential “misuse” of Decadence: that is, as the driver of an exoticism that perpetuated imperialist narratives about the inevitable extinction of Indigenous peoples.