Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 Todd Starkweather Patrick Brantlinger. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 2003. x + 248 pp. Patrick Brantlinger’s Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (2003) offers an excellent new historical analysis on a collection of literary and historical texts that otherwise would not have found themselves compiled together. One of Brantlinger’s greater strengths as a scholar, displayed here and in previous works such as Rule of Darkness (1986), lies in combining previously ignored or under-thought texts in wider historical contexts and aligning them alongside the historical discourse gleaned from letters, transcripts, travelogues and other texts and documents in a fashion that allows for penetrating literary and historical insight. Dark Vanishings’s subject matter concerns what Brantlinger refers to as extinction discourse, “a specific branch of the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism” (1) that lead to the conclusion that indigenous non-European peoples would inevitably face extinction from their own barbarism and savagery, which was self-exterminating, and from the onrush of “white” civilization throughout all corners of the globe. Part of what makes extinction discourse an interesting and fruitful topic for scholarly discourse is, as Brantlinger rightly notes, the lack of geographic and physical boundaries. Brantlinger limits himself only to English-language texts, but presumably extinction discourse traverses linguistic barriers as well: “Like Orientalism and other versions of racism, it does not respect the boundaries of disciplines or the cultural hierarchies of high and low; instead, it is found wherever and whenever Europeans and white Americans encountered indigenous peoples” (1).The lack of respect of boundaries and disciplines on the part of extinction discourse allows Brantlinger to not merely collect a vast array of textual sources, but, far more crucially, to make them speak to one another in manners that they have not in the past. Brantlinger accomplishes no small feat when he situates Anthony Trollope’s writings about Ireland and Irish in Castle Richmond alongside James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans so as both readings compliment the other. Brantlinger sets up his study by laying the historical and theoretical groundwork in his introduction, “Aboriginal matters,” and his second chapter, “Pre-Darwinian Theories on the Extinction of Primitive Races.” Both of these initial chapters allow Brantlinger to cogently lay the foundations for the historical discourse during the time frame of his study and offer theoretical [End Page 303] explanations for the reasons why the discourse, or discourses, were emerging. Brantlinger’s explanation of how three pre-Darwinian discourses, natural history, economics, and anthropology, informed extinction discourse is useful in helping understand how Brantlinger reads Darwin’s influence on extinction discourse in chapter 8, “Darwin and after,” and in understanding Brantlinger’s readings of texts that intersect pre- and post-Darwin thought. In the remaining chapters, Dark Vanishings traces out Brantlinger’s overarching thesis that extinction discourse was driven by the internalized belief, on the part of “white civilization” that the primitive races, be they Native American, Irish, or Aboriginal Australian, would soon exterminate themselves through savagery and barbarism and that, even if they attempted to change and adapt to “civilized” ways of living, they could not withstand the forces of nature that would inevitably drive them to extinction as white civilization advanced. In chapter 3, “Vanishing Americans,” Brantlinger writing about Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, asserts that: The metaphor of the savage as futureless child is related to discourse about the economic development, based on the assumption that societies, like individuals, grow up or mature. But Cooper does not expect his Indians to develop or mature; he expects them to die. His “children of the forest” are frozen in a pre-state immaturity, apparently without government and almost without law, as Jefferson, for one, declared them to be. 66 Brantlinger’s analysis of Cooper not only displays how he uncovers the ideology of extinction discourse running through the literature, but also how he is able contextualize those literary readings alongside other historical documents that contribute to the ideology within the literature. For Brantlinger, the question is not...