Description
Book SynopsisIn Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet...
Trade ReviewTaming Cannibals itself provides a nuanced, powerfully told, and richly detailed story of the ways in which the paradox of racial and imperial thought and writing has been, and continues to be, constitutive of the West's often agonistic but no less humanly costly self-understanding.
* Victorian Studies *
Readers familiar with Patrick Brantlinger's many distinguished books on Victorian literature will welcome his most recent contribution, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, which he describes as the third in a 'trilogy' of Victorian and postcolonial studies projects that include his groundbreaking Rule of Darkness and Dark Vanishings. Taming Cannibals focuses on 'various contradictions inherent in racist and imperialist ideology’ (p. 2), especially its so-called civilizing mission, and explores ways in which conceptions of race helped Victorians interpret and classify humans elsewhere, ‘including themselves’ (p. 19).
* Studies in English Literature *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Race and the Victorians
Part I. Two Island Stories
1. Missionaries and Cannibals in Nineteenth-Century Fiji
2. King Billy's Bones: The Last Tasmanians
Part II. Racial Alternatives
3. Going Native in Nineteenth-Century History and Literature
4. "God Works by Races": Benjamin Disraeli's Caucasian Arabian Hebrew Tent
Part III. The 1860s: The Decade after Darwin's Origin
5. Race and Class in the 1860s
6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Irish
Part IV. Ancient and Future Races
7. Mummy Love: H. Rider Haggard and Racial Archaeology
8. "Shadows of the Coming Race"
Epilogue: Kipling’s "The White Man’s Burden" and Its Afterlives
Notes
Works Cited
Index
