Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians by Patrick Brantlinger (review)

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 inferiority 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 barbarism. Taming Cannibals takes a fresh, provocative look at the modern controversy about the prevalence of customary cannibalism in Fiji. It positively re-evaluates missionary discourse, which, however it may have exaggerated such shocking customs for its own ends, was a central, if highly mediated, conduit for the Fijians’ own accounts of cannibalism. The instance of cannibalism aside, missionary writings, including those of the controversial George Augustus Robinson, notorious for his spectacularly failed attempts to save the last Tasmanians from extinction, deserve, Brantlinger argues, a more nuanced and careful rereading, one that doesn’t seek to summarily dismiss their evidence for its bias, but listens to what these amateur ethnologists can tell us about early colonial life and early forms of “colonial knowledge” (54).

While making its own distinctive case, Taming Cannibals succeeds brilliantly in complicating as well as synthesising the now impressive body of work which approaches the history of empire from an anti-imperial and anti-racist stance. Brantlinger always prefers the historically specific reading to high levels of theoretical abstraction, although he draws judiciously on theory where he thinks it deepens an interpretation. Wide-ranging examples of imagined and actual Westerners adopting Eastern or indigenous identities—“going native”—confirm the difficulty of generalizing about the motives and meaning of such counterintuitive but numerous cross identifications (18). For the pervasiveness of racial thinking meant that Victorians feared degeneration as much as they championed the civilizing process; it was only too easy, many thought, for Westerners to slide down the evolutionary scale, and the abyss which threatens is countered by a compensatory celebration and defence of Aryanism. In Victorian fiction villains like Magwitch impersonate cannibals to frighten little children, and angry children—Jane Eyre and Heathcliff—imagine themselves as rebellious heathens or are so imagined by others. Kipling’s Kim may come close to an idealized hybrid, almost in spite of his creator’s “racial absolutism,” but Brantlinger demonstrates that it is moot whether such experiments in shape-shifting can ever be understood as anti-imperialist or anti-racist (212). This point is beautifully drawn out in his discussion of Benjamin Disraeli’s complex romance with the Orient throughout his dual career as writer and imperialist politician. A “brilliant bricoleur of the racial ideas of his era,” Disraeli’s version of philo-semitism in which the Jews are the so-called pure Caucasians was specifically devised, Brantlinger argues, to “outflank” Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonism, while reinforcing the salience of race (100). Disraeli’s emphasis on race as a central explanation of human difference, inequality, and conflict finds its apogee in the 1860s when it becomes almost a commonplace subscribed to by ethnologists, social explorers, cultural analysts, and political thinkers. As Brantlinger points out, Britain’s urban underclass, including the...