The Wasp — 1878 — page 317: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page contains a short story by Charles Warren Stoddard, not a political cartoon. The narrative describes a group of performers—"a dozen performers entered, sitting in two lines, face to face—six women and six men"—who perform an indigenous Hawaiian dance ritual called the *piu-lu*. The story presents an ethnographic account of Hawaiian cultural performance, describing the dancers' movements, the musicians' participation, and the narrator's reactions with both fascination and some condescension typical of 19th-century Western perspectives on indigenous practices. This appears to be literary fiction rather than satire, documenting Hawaiian cultural traditions for *The Wasp's* primarily white American readership.