Modern Settler Colonialism and the Future of Endangered Races

Description

'Exterminate all the brutes': Modern Settler Colonialism and the Future of Endangered Races

Sadiah Qureshi (University of Birmingham)
Respondent: Britta Schilling  (University of Cambridge)

Abstract

Lamenting the predicament of dying races became an increasingly prominent occupation in the long nineteenth century. Novelists, painters, scientists, politicians, poets, travel writers and missionaries all contributed to creating and perpetuating the sense that some peoples were doomed to a speedy extinction. Early-modern writers had long noted the apparent decimation of some indigenous peoples; however, such discussions took on a new and urgent form in the nineteenth century as commentators were increasingly able to appeal to a new scientific understanding of extinction as an endemic feature of natural change. This talk will discuss how histories of human endangerment might allow us to address issues of wider importance, such as the relationships between scientific knowledge and political policy-making, competing visions of endangered peoples' lives and the nature of intercultural contact within settler colonies.
 

 

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