"Flies"

Title

"Flies"

Description

This article accompanies All the Year Round’s first Moonstone publication. The article begins by discussing different types of flies that are found in the Old World and the New World. It starts out as a harmless, rather domestic conversation on the biology of flies, but quickly evolves into an imperialist analogy; the white “civilized” races correspond to the European fly, and the dark-skinned races, the “savages” of the New World, correspond to the indigenous. It blatantly states, “Everyone knows that the civilized man is, and always has been, more than a match for the savage…if two races refuse to amalgamate, the weaker goes to the wall. Civilization is too much for them.” This article theorizes racist pseudo-science that blatantly condones violent colonialism and imperialism. Its makes social Darwinist assumptions that essentially support genocide as a natural conclusion. The fact that “[e]veryone knows” suggests that this view was widely held in Britain. It is safe to say that Harper’s variety of “white superiority,” and, by extension, America’s variety of imperialism, is much more subtle and self-conscious. Perhaps this sensitivity came from the delicate state race relations in the postwar Reconstruction era.

Source

Archives and Special Collections

Publisher

Calgary: University of Calgary

Date

Contributor

Migliarese, Mico.

Rights

http://library.ucalgary.ca/copyright/images

Language

English

Type

text

Original Format

Print publication

Files

mico_0004_.tif

Citation

Dickens, Charles. , “"Flies",” University of Calgary Class Projects, accessed November 21, 2024, https://test.omeka.ucalgary.ca/document/115.