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InTaming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the \"civilizing mission\" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with \"lesser\" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior-an even \"fitter\" or \"higher\" race or species. Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts-includingRobinson Crusoeby Daniel Defoe,Fiji and the Fijiansby Thomas Williams,Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmaniansby James Bonwick,The Descent of Manby Charles Darwin,Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad,Culture and Anarchyby Matthew Arnold,Sheby H. Rider Haggard, andThe War of the Worldsby H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and richTaming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.

In the global convulsions in the aftermath of World War II, one dominant world racial order broke apart and a new one emerged. In Represent and Destroy, Jodi Melamed portrays the postwar racial break as a transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist modernity in which racial violence works normatively by policing representations of difference.

Racial injustice refers to the unfair treatment of a specific race in a community, which disadvantages one race. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the social consequences of systemic racism and identify the various types of racial injustices experienced by Black people in the 1930s, as depicted in Wright's Native Son. Qualitative and descriptive methods, as well as Lucien Goldmann's Genetic Structuralism methods, were used. The results showed various forms of racism, including prejudice, negative stereotypes, segregation, and social isolation. These types of injustice have had a severe impact on African Americans, as seen through the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who represented the constant state of fear, uncertainty, and frustration inflicted upon Black people. By uncovering the different kinds of racial injustice, this study emphasized the importance of societal reflection and action in eliminating long-standing racial biases and injustices.

Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe's Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as \"evil\" and white as \"good.\" Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of \"monstrous peoples\" to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this \"amalgamation\" of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of \"whites\" with \"blacks,\" the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. InMiscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race. Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper'sLast of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's \"Murders in the Rue Morgue,\" and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word \"miscegenation\" was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

Gregorio Sancianco, the author of El Progreso de Filipinas (1881), is an ephemeral figure in Philippine history. Although somewhat known for his defense of the native against charges of indolence, Sancianco advanced a penetrating critique of colonial tribute that generally has been ignored but to which this article draws attention. Sancianco argued that tribute did not only negate the principle of assimilation, but it also divided the native population and provoked social antagonisms. The tribute’s abolition in 1884 rendered Sancianco’s historical position as transitional, straddling the creole nationalism of the 1860s and the ilustrados’ colonial nationalism of the 1880s. Sancianco’s critique of tribute anticipated nationalist consciousness.

This article turns to the context of what has come to be known as South Africa in order to examine how Victorian literary studies could engage more fully and responsibly with the Indigenous literatures of the British Empire. Drawing on the frameworks and methods developed within Indigenous studies and in recent work by Khoisan scholars, the essay develops a reading practice that works to recuperate traces of Khoisan oral traditions from the colonial archive by centering Khoisan ways of knowing and forms of expression. The article ends by using this apparatus and approach to briefly analyze Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883). In so doing, it identifies points of critical entry for both disrupting the novel's glancing and deeply racist treatment of its few Khoisan characters and for registering how these characters showcase forms of Khoisan knowledge, cultural survival, and aesthetic prowess.

Introduction: A body without a nation -- Mapping fugitivity in Black drama -- Fugitive acts -- Performing escape -- Fugitive intimacies -- Epilogue: Contemplating and complicating Black freedom.