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Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, by Pat rick Brantlinger; pp. x + 277. Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 2011, $45.00.
For almost three decades Patrick Brantlinger has been in the vanguard of critics and cultural historians who argue that empire was at the heart, not the periphery of nineteenth- century British life. Taming Cannibals is the third in a trilogy, dedicated to exploring how and why empire and race mattered to Britons in the long nineteenth century. the now canonical Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988) was followed by Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (2003). these are interlinked and overlapping studies, the last two books returning productively to themes drawn from the "repertoire of Victorian imperialism and racism" adumbrated in the epilogue of Rule of Darkness (262). ranging from their deployment in nineteenth- century missionary accounts of the Fiji and tasmanian islanders to the influence of rudyard Kipling's "the White man's Burden" (1899) on theodore roosevelt, the essays in Taming Cannibals anatomize that repertoire and its leading tropes, highlighting the key contradiction in racist and imperialist ideology: the widespread belief in the innate inferi- ority of indigenous peoples set against the imperial rationale of the civilizing mission.
that so - called savages ate their enemies was one of the most longstanding proofs of their barba rism. Taming Cannibals t akes a fresh, provocative look at the modern controversy about t he prevalence of customar y cannibalism in Fiji. It posit ively re- evaluates missionar y discourse, which, however it may have exaggerated such shock ing customs for its ow n ends, was a central, i f highly mediated, conduit for the Fijians' ow n account s of cannibalism. the instance of cannibalism a side, missionar y w ritings, including those of the controversial George augustus robinson, notorious for his spect acularly failed attempts to save the last...