The Pretended Asian

George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax

By Michael Keevak

Cloth - 9780814331989 (Out-Of-Print)


Published 2004
Size: 6 X 9, Pages: 174

Subjects: Cultural Studies


Description

In the summer of 1703, George Psalmanazar traveled to London posing as an East Asian native from Formosa—now modern Taiwan. In the following year, Psalmanazar published a book about his “native” country, A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, a highly entertaining account of exotic Asiatic customs, replete with illustrations of Formosan costumes, temples, houses, castles, funeral processions, ships, and coins, as well as examples of the Formosan language and its alphabet. The book quickly went through two editions and appeared in French, Dutch, and German. Psalmanazar’s fake Formosan language even became confused as an authentic language sample in the developing field of comparative linguistics.

Despite having been a blond European, posing as a member of another “race” was never a problem for Psalmanazar or his audience, since the concept of race, Michael Keevak claims, did not yet exist. In The Pretended Asian, Keevak looks at how Psalmanazar—far from having a difficult time pretending to be East Asian—readily played upon Asian stereotypes and the preconceptions of a public all too eager to learn about the Far East, enabling him to build an identity that could even withstand thorough scrutiny. In addition to Psalmanazar’s entertaining story, Keevak discusses what was known about the actual Formosa in the early eighteenth century and why this knowledge was powerless to disprove the truth of Psalmanazar’s claims. The Pretended Asian also traces Psalmanazar’s later career as a Grub Street hack writer and how his lifelong refusal to reveal his real identity—even after Europeans stopped believing he was a native of Formosa—may have rendered Psalmanazar a permanent outsider.

Published by Wayne State University Press

Author(s)

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University and author of Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (Wayne State University Press, 2001).

Other Books by Michael Keevak: Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture,

Reviews

“Michael Keevak’s The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax is an engaging study that looks at the peculiar literary career of a white man who called himself George Psalmanazar, who claimed to be from the Japanese island of Formosa (now Taiwan), whose hoax was admitted within his lifetime, and who somehow earned the love and respect of Samuel Johnson in spite of it.  Keevak analyzes the enduring popularity of Psalmanazar through the eighteenth-century lenses of racial identity, literary self-fashioning and influence, linguistic agility, and religious commitment.  This book is worth reading in any context of global eighteenth-century studies.”

— Studies in English Literature,


“Michael Keevak’s The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax is an engaging study that looks at the peculiar literary career of a white man who called himself George Psalmanazar, who claimed to be from the Japanese island of Formosa (now Taiwan), whose hoax was admitted within his lifetime, and who somehow earned the love and respect of Samuel Johnson in spite of it.  Keevak analyzes the enduring popularity of Psalmanazar through the eighteenth-century lenses of racial identity, literary self-fashioning and influence, linguistic agility, and religious commitment.  This book is worth reading in any context of global eighteenth-century studies.”

— Studies in English Literature


“The story of George Psalmanazar, while not common knowledge, is one of those historical curiosities that linger in the background of cultural history, and references to this eighteenth-century hoax crop up repeatedly in the works of Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, and other key figures in literature of the period.  And a most peculiar story it is: in 1703 a young man arrived in London claiming to be a convert of Anglican Christianity from the island of Formosa, where both cannibalism and child sacrifice were common practice.  This book is rich in its exploration of this single story and it generates ideas that lead also to further questions of identity and the construction of persona.”

— Chinese Cross Currents


“Michael Keevak’s The Pretended Asian is a learned and engaging study of one of the eighteenth century’s most outlandish hoaxes—George Psalmanazar’s often successful efforts to pass himself off as a native of Formosa. The man who called himself Psalmanazar reinvented himself repeatedly, and his tale reveals a good deal about intellectual life and popular culture in the Augustan era. Late in his life, he became a scholar of Hebrew and a friend of, among others, Samuel Johnson. Keevak has done an exemplary job of researching the man and the hoax, and The Pretended Asian is a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century studies.”

— Robert Markley, University of Illinois


“Michael Keevak has woven together the disparate strands of this strange story more successfully than any other scholar. Psalmanazar, the ‘pretended Formosan,’ emerges from this compelling study as a linguistic, religious, racial, and ethnic outsider—a ‘wandering Jew’ in eighteenth-century England.”

— Robert DeMaria, Jr., Vassar College