Dark Vanishings
Subtitle: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: September 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780801488764
Subjects: History of ideas, intellectual history; Indigenous peoples; Literary studies: general; Literature - Classics / Criticism; European - General; Social Science; Sociology; British Isles; Social Darwinism; Discrimination & Racism; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Eurocentrism; Genocide
Description: 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. -- from back cover.