The enduring strength in Patrick Brantlinger's postcolonial scholarship is a willingness to engage with the traditionally neglected early and mid-Victorian periods. By the 1990s a rising number of scholars were analyzing colonial discourse in late Victorian literature, giving the later nineteenth century an iconic status in the history of race and empire. Brantlinger's great achievement has been in putting the Victorian Humpty Dumpty together again by linking earlier humanitarianism with later social Darwinism. By transcending the conventional periodization of racism, Brantlinger was among the first to identify one of the most critical contradictions in the history of the British Empire: “the intricate and often contradictory connections between abolitionism and liberalism on the one hand, and imperialism and racism on the other” (1). Taming Cannibals is the third overview treatment of these contradictions.
Four sections examine a small number of published texts amid discussion of their 1859 theoretical and historiographical context. “Island Stories” uses the first volume of the missionary dulology Fiji and the Fijians, Thomas Williams's The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1859). The second volume, by Williams's colleague James Calvert, is not discussed here. Together with James Bonwick's Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians (1870), Brantlinger intends the discussion of Williams to introduce what is supposed to be the general theme of the book: cannibalism (more about that later). It is certainly easy to discuss this theme in a Fijian context, and Brantlinger comes to a conclusion familiar to Pacific historians (though perhaps not anthropologists): that cannibal stories should be taken seriously and critically, rather than dismissed as entirely Western inventions. He is on less sure ground when he declares that “even the most detailed, sympathetic missionary accounts of Polynesian cultures overemphasize the ‘horrid’ and ‘unspeakable’ in contrast to the peaceful, productive and artistic” (35). Leaving aside the question of whether or not Fijians were a “Polynesian” culture, the historical record of Brantlinger's long nineteenth century simply does not support this allegation. Missionary ethnographer Lorimer Fison used his Fijian fieldwork to help establish the new discipline of social anthropology; Robert Codrington of the Melanesian Mission fought against the sensationalized accounts of cannibalism by travelers and colonial officials. Brantlinger's stereotype also raises questions about the second chapter in this section, which treats James Bonwick's text and its account of the missionary George Augustus Robinson's work with the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen's Land/Tasmania. Robinson always denied that the indigenous Tasmanians were cannibals, although he accepted the popular “doomed race” theory of their future. It remains unclear how Robinson's observations relate to the book's overall theme of “taming cannibals.”
Part 2, on “Racial Alternatives,” opens with a discussion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) to explore the idea of “going native,” either in person or through imagination. There is fairly little on Heart of Darkness itself, probably a blessing given its overexposure in postcolonial scholarship; instead, Brantlinger gives us a cogent overview of theoretical and historiographical approaches to “colonial desire.” Not enough credit is given here to Robert Young's pioneering work, but the main question is: how does this involve taming cannibals? The second chapter focuses on Benjamin Disraeli's views of race and culture and provides a fresh, creative approach to the massive tensions at the heart of Disraeli's views of empire. As Britain's first prime minister of Jewish descent, Disraeli was a leading imperial “otherer” while remaining “other” himself. By proudly embracing his Jewish heritage, Disraeli “went native” from the heart of empire. This was the most innovative part of the book for me, but the connection with the cannibal theme remained elusive.
In “The 1860s: The Decade after Darwin's Origin,” Brantlinger, good historical materialist that he is, takes us through developments with an eye kept firmly on class distinctions. He never makes the mistake of detaching texts from their social conditions of production and reception, enabling him to avoid the textual determinism that has plagued the work of so many postcolonial scholars eager to avoid the Marxian taint. It is no surprise, therefore, to find him engaging with the work of Catherine Hall in this chapter, and Christopher Herbert has also had a formative influence (he is cited throughout the book). Thus Brantlinger discusses Henry Mayhew and other Victorian ethnographers who explored the otherness of the Victorian street and its (often Irish) “savages.” The racialization of Ireland, as seen in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869), is undeniable; the link with cannibalism is much less clear.
Finally, “Ancient and Future Races” attempts to link H. Rider Haggard's archaeological obsessions in She (1887) and elsewhere with Anne McClintock's diagnosis of “porno-tropic” discourse in Kipling's work and with early science fiction, such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898). For Brantlinger, the Egyptology craze of the later nineteenth century created an “ambivalent interplay between ancient and modern” (163) and a sort of necrophilia. It is not very clear how this relates to early science fiction, and the introduction of another motive for empire—human psychology—is not accompanied by the theoretical and historiographical contextualization familiar in other parts of the book. Late Victorian theories of atavism, for example, would have illuminated the discussion, as a bridge between evolutionism (as discussed in the previous section of the book) and modern genetic science in understanding what “inheritance” meant.
In his epilogue on Kipling's “White Man's Burden” (1899), inheritances are very much on Brantlinger's mind. Despite its many critics, Kipling's “burden” would be taken up again and again, most recently by those defending Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. By this point, the cannibals have been well out of sight for several chapters, raising questions about the book's title. Brantlinger has written an incisive critique of stereotypes of all sorts; why exploit those stereotypes by choosing a sensationalist title? I am often dismayed by the way some postcolonial scholars continue to cluster round the cannibals/headhunters/human sacrificers of empire, exploiting the ongoing power of radicalized colonial discourse while denouncing it in their scholarship. People love to read lurid stories, and books with “cannibals” in the title will catch the eye much more effectively than others. But who will deconstruct the deconstructers?
