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Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. By Patrick Brantlinger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. x + 248 pages.
Those familiar with the Brantlinger formula will not be surprised by the contents or the approach of this, his eighth single-authored book since 1977, a sequel of sorts to the widely cited survey, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988). Brantlinger subscribes to the Fordist model of academic production, and his many same-seeming books invariably provide readers with functional overviews of wide-ranging (most often nineteenth-century) Anglo-American cultural obsessions. In this particular case, the obsession that Brantlinger has taken it upon himself to map out involves what he refers to, in self-consciously "Foucauldian terminology" (1), as "extinction discourse," which is "a specific branch of the dual ideologies of imperialism and racism" that stressed "the inevitable disappearance of some or all primitive races" (1). The most characteristic feature of this nineteenth-century discourse, one learns in the opening pages, is the "future-perfect mode" of "proleptic elegy" (4), which consistently figures indigenous peoples as those who, if they are not already extinct, eventually will have become so. Extinction discourse often pinned the blame for this past, present, or future-perfect extinction on the indigenes themselves: hence the central role in this discourse of the trope of the "self-exterminating savage," a "ghostly twin" of the Noble Savage (3) that served to mitigate guilt "and sometimes excused or even encouraged violence toward those deemed savage" (3). Brantlinger delivers these three key concepts-"extinction discourse," "proleptic elegy," "self-exterminating savage"-in the first four pages; readers will search in vain through the rest of the book for any others.
And there lies the eternal rub with all of Brantlinger's work: a very few "big" ideas are made to go a very long way. In lieu of multilayered argument and critical finesse, Brantlinger consistently settles for breadth of exposition as his intellectual contribution; whatever interesting argumentative nuggets one finds in the eight chapters that follow his introduction can almost invariably be traced to the work of other historians and literary critics who have dealt in greater detail with the specific case studies that make up his comprehensive survey. He cites the research and ideas of these specialists generously (I cannot recall reading an...