This essay examines the representations of pygmies in the works of American and European travelers to Africa. It is intended to supplement both recent studies on concepts of race in the second half of the nineteenth century and recent theories on the body. The talk will focus primarily on the works of Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, who first brought pygmies to the attention of Americans and Europeans in 1867 with the publication of A Journey to Ashango-Land and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. The essay will argue that Du Chaillu and later travelers used depictions of pygmies to bolster myths about the competition of races, the inevitable extinction of inferior races, and the origins of humanity. When a group of pygmies was brought to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, their small bodies also helped solidify an American national self-image predicated on progressive expansion and conducive to imperialism.
The essay will supplement recent studies on the history of race by investigating the intersection of race and stature prejudices. Most studies of race have focused on physical characteristics like cranial capacity, ignoring the important role that stature played. Unless we consider stature, we cannot adequately characterize the nineteenth-century understanding of race; we cannot account for the plethora of articles and books devoted primarily to height, some of which are listed in the 300-page 1968 bibliographic guide, Pygmies and Other Short-Sized Races. And without attending to prejudices about stature, we cannot rectify the continuing influence of these biases.
The essay also contributes to recent writings on the body. Scholars have addressed a variety of bodies, including female, male, black, gay, Jewish, criminal, and disabled bodies, but not small ones. This study suggests that, in turn-of-the-century America, small bodies played a role in various discourses sharing common values and assumptions. In travel writing, medicine, anthropology, and popular exhibits, physical characteristics were clues to the human past and the evolutionary future. Evidence of the Darwinian struggle among the races was written on the body, and the small body was consistently a sign of degeneration.
"There was hardly a person in the United States living between the years 1867 and 1910 who did not know Paul," wrote Du Chaillu's biographer in 1930. "His books for children had become so popular that English-speaking boys all over the world could recite long passages by heart." The essay focuses on the writings of Du Chaillu because his legacy has been both significant and neglected and because his texts reflect the preconceptions and myths informing early reactions to the Du Chaillu ushered in more than a century of fascination with pygmies and influenced narrative treatment of the group for decades; his reports of pygmies immediately captured the popular and scientific imaginations, spawned a series of journeys by later travelers, permeated American popular culture through dime novel spinoffs, and generated a tradition of children's stories involving pygmies or small people as main characters, including Tolkien's bestsellers The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
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