Beyond control: Orientalist tensions and the history of the "upas tree" myth. (June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hannigan, Tim
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 55:Number 2(2020)
• Page Start: 173
• Page End: 189
• Publication Date: 2020-06
• Subjects: colonial Indonesia -- J. N. Foersch -- John Mandeville -- Orientalism -- poison tree -- Thomas Stamford Raffles -- Rumphius -- upas tree; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989418754345
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

The "upas tree" is one of the most enduring European myths about Southeast Asia. Accounts of a tree so toxic that it renders the surrounding atmosphere deadly can first be identified in fourteenth-century journey narratives covering what is now Indonesia. But while most other such apocrypha vanished from later European accounts of the region, the upas myth remained prominent and in fact became progressively more elaborate and fantastical, culminating in a notorious hoax: the 1783 account of J. N. Foersch. This article examines the history of the development of the upas myth, and considers the divergent responses to Foersch's hoax amongst scientists and colonial administrators on the one hand, and poets, playwrights, and artists on the other. In this it reveals a significant tension within the emerging "Orientalist" discourse about Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century.