Dark Vanishings Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800 1930

Patrick Brantlinger

ISBN 10: 0801488761 / ISBN 13: 9780801488764

Published by Cornell Univ Pr, 2003

About this Item

1st edition. 260 pages. 8.75x6.00x0.75 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # xr0801488761

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dark Vanishings Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800 1930
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801488761
• ISBN 13: 9780801488764
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.4 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history.

Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction discourse was ironically applied to "the great white race" in various apocalyptic formulations. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the world, by the 1930s the stereotypic idea of "fatal impact" began to unravel, as did also various more general forms of race-based thinking and of social Darwinism.

About the Author

Patrick Brantlinger is James Rudy and College Alumni Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English and Victorian Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of many books, including Fictions of State, Rule of Darkness, and Bread and Circuses, also from Cornell.