Description
Book SynopsisBrantlinger here examines the commonly held 19th-century view that all "primitive" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction.
Trade ReviewDark Vanishings should interest historians of ethnology and of cultural anthropology in general.... Of particular importance is the question of whether the notion of race, however defined, forged Europeans into racists.... The bibliography has value for historians of biology, of economics, and of English literature, not the sort of bedfellows one might have expected before reading Dark Vanishings. Sociologists of science, sure to find in Brantlinger's narrative a sociology of racism in the guise of science, round out the group of scholars who will benefit from reading Dark Vanishings.
* Isis *
Patrick Brantlinger's argument in Dark Vanishings is straightforward: from 1830 onwards, economists, pioneering anthropologists, natural scientists and literary writers believed that 'primitive' peoples were doomed to extinction.... Belief in the inevitability of the natives' fall assuaged guilt about the depopulating effects of colonialism.... A significant achievement in Dark Vanishings is Brantlinger's partial, conditional rehabilitation of the race theorists, Robert Knox and Alfred Wallace. Brantlinger shows that, although frequently ludicrous and ill-willed, such writers' works need to read with care, as they influenced still-extant concepts about First World superiority.
* Times Literary Supplement *
The 'dark vanishings' of Patrick Brantlinger's most recent book are the presumed extinctions, especially self-extinguishings, of people not deemed to be, or not deemed to be capable of being, civilized, of those who cannot participate in Western Progress. Dark Vanishings is obviously required reading for anyone interested in Victorian studies of race and empire.
* English Literature in Transition *
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Aboriginal Matters
2. Pre-Darwinian Theories on the Extinction of Primitive Races
3. Vanishing Americans
4. Humanitarian Causes: Antislavery and Saving Aboriginals
5. The Irish Famine
6. The Dusk of the Dreamtime
7. Islands of Death and the Devil
8. Darwin and After
9. Conclusion: White TwilightsNotes
Works Cited
Index
