ABSTRACT
Imperialism and its outcome-the destruction of targeted communitieshas gained support from entrenched pseudo-scientifi c ideas. One such belief places so-called lower races on the path to extinction. In Elana Bregin’s “Ella’s Dunes” (2004), the targeted group is a San community in South Africa which has taken up residence in a game park designed to entertain White South African tourists. Bregin’s adoption of the “doomed races” theory becomes explicit when the father of the teenaged narrator, Annette, explains to his daughter why the game park is necessary to the survival of San communities: “‘They’re . . . the last survivors’” (19). If left on their own, they face “‘Starvation! Complete poverty! Drinking themselves to death’” (28). The reference to alcoholism brings together the extinction theme with a variety of stereotypes that permeate the narrative, for example, “Bushmen” as warlike, animal-like, static, mysterious, and furnished with “wild forests of hair” (27). A third strand in this short story (the lead story in Memories of Sun: Stories of Africa and America, 2004) is the Africans-on-exhibit theme.
