Savage perils [electronic resource] : racial frontiers and nuclear apocalypse in American culture

__Revisiting the racial origins of the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery” in twentieth-century America__ The atomic age brought the Bomb and spawned stories of nuclear apocalypse to remind us of impending doom. As Patrick Sharp reveals, those stories had their origins well before Hiroshima, reaching back to Charles Darwin and America’s frontier. In __Savage Perils__, Sharp examines the racial underpinnings of American culture, from the early industrial age to the Cold War. He explores the influence of Darwinism, frontier nostalgia, and literary modernism on the history and representations of nuclear weaponry. Taking into account such factors as anthropological race theory and Asian immigration, he charts the origins of a worldview that continues to shape our culture and politics. Sharp dissects Darwin’s arguments regarding the struggle between “civilization” and “savagery,” theories that fueled future-war stories ending in Anglo dominance in Britain and influenced Turnerian visions of the frontier in America. Citing George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” Sharp argues that many Americans still believe in the racially charged opposition between civilization and savagery, and consider the possibility of nonwhite “savages” gaining control of technology the biggest threat in the “war on terror.” His insightful book shows us that this conflict is but the latest installment in an ongoing saga that has been at the heart of American identity from the beginning―and that understanding it is essential if we are to eradicate racist mythologies from American life. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 18 Part I. Technological Superiority: Darwin's Theory and the Representation of Future War 24 Chapter 1. The Triumph of Civilization: Race and American Exceptionalism before Darwin 26 Chapter 2. Man the Toolmaker: Race, Technology and Colonialism in Darwin's The Descent of Man 46 Chapter 3. The Darwinist Frontier: Roosevelt, Turner, and the Evolution of the West 63 Chapter 4. Darwin's Bulldogs: Evolution and the Future-War Story in Britain 79 Part II. Survival of the Whitest: American Future-War Stories and the Representation of World War II 102 Chapter 5. Conquering New Frontiers: Burroughs, London, and the Race Wars of the Future 104 Chapter 6. The Yellow Peril: Science Fiction and the Response to the Pacific War 122 Chapter 7. "A Very Pleasant Way to Die": Science Fiction, Race, and the Official Representation of the Atomic Bomb 136 Chapter 8. Beyond the Yellow Peril: John Hersey's "Hiroshima" 154 Part III. The Nuclear Frontier: Race and the Representation of Future War, 1945–1959 166 Chapter 9. Official Fictions: Future-War Stories after Hiroshima 168 Chapter 10. Survival and Self-Help: Civil Defense, White Suburbia, and the Rise of the Nuclear Frontier 185 Chapter 11. The Color of Ground Zero: Civil Defense, Segregation, and Savagery on the Nuclear Frontier 210 Conclusion 234 Notes 240 Bibliography 264 Index 280