Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians

by Patrick Brantlinger

In 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 civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with "lesser" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior―an even "fitter" or "higher" race or species. Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts―including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians by James Bonwick, The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, She by H. Rider Haggard, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and rich Taming Cannibals , Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.

Genres: Victorian

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2011

Reviews

[Charlotte Kersten]

A difficult read but a very good one. A few notes:
-The main justification for British colonialism was to "civilize" nonwhite people, but this was contradicted by a co-occuring belief that nonwhite people could not truly be civilized - at best they could only mimic their "betters."
-The British claimed that the nonwhite peoples they interacted with were somehow doomed to inevitable extinction because of the forces of nature and not because of British violence and the effects of colonialism.
-By affixing social inequalities at the product of race the Victorians made these inequalities biological and immutable - if inequalities are a result of (biological, immutable) race then attempting to address them with social interventions is a lost cause.
-Eugenicists believed that civilization acted in contrast to natural selection by preserving the weak who should perish and allowing them to multiply while the fittest and most "civilized" individuals couldn't keep up reproductively.
-The process of "taming" and "civilizing" nonwhite people came about through horrendous violence, a paradox that was apparently lost upon its perpetrators.
-The "White Man's Burden" represented the opinion that the creation of empire was in fact a burden instead of a boon because of the ingratitude and resistance of its subjects to its alleged beneficence, and that as the most civilized race it was the thankless duty of the European to civilize the rest of the world.

[gloria · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome sauce!