#imagine me wearing the jstor hat that i wish i owned

[eternalgirlscout]

hello !! I am very interested in your reading recs about cannibalism and colonialism !!!!!

delighted to hear it!! some of what i'm linking here is on JSTOR or otherwise behind institutional access. if you need help with that, lmk. i have some PDFs floating around.

i've included a quotation from each source i link below, so be advised that this contains references to... well, exactly what you would expect to see in writings about colonization and the consumption of human bodies.

"Dismembering the Trope: Imagining Cannibalism in the Ancient Pueblo World" by Randall H. McGuire and Ruth M. Van Dyke provides a good overview of some fundamentals in this area, plus it's part of the free sample of Social Violence in the Prehispanic American Southwest on Google Books so you don't need JSTOR access.

For 500 years Europeans used the charge of cannibalism as an instrument of colonialism to justify the enslavement, killing, conquest, and displacement of indigenous peoples. Because such a powerful concept is highly overdetermined, discussions of cannibalism are laden with multiple meanings, pernicious implications, and emotion. Clearly, at various times and places in the history of the world, people have eaten human flesh. Close examination of these cases, however, reveals that people have done so under a variety of conditions and for diverse reasons. The reality of anthropophagy does not match the imagination of cannibalism (pg. 7-8)

Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas by Gananath Obeyesekere is something you'll see cited in a lot of work on this topic--the epigraph of McGuire and Van Dyke is from this book. Obeyesekere articulates, and complicates, a distinction between anthropophagic acts and "cannibalism," the latter being "a fantasy that the Other is going to eat us."

The impossibility of finding monsters in the actual world as it expanded before the European consciousness had one notable exception. The anthropophagi of the medieval world were converted into the cannibal. The term “cannibal” replaced the term “anthropophagi” and became a sign of savagism. As far as the original Island Caribs were concerned, they were wiped off the face of the earth by intruding diseases and intrusive killings. The killing of monsters was after all a part of the fantasy and of the heroic myths of Western culture throughout its history (pg. 14)

"Alter-Carnation: Notes on Cannibalism and Coloniality in the Brazilian Context" by Filipe Maia is a really exciting read and engages with Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropófago."

In the colonial setting, cannibalism is a tactic of resistance through incorporation—it is the killing of the colonizers but not their annihilation. Brazilian philosophers, poets, and artists have approached the story of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha as a mythical point of departure for what Brazil would come to be. Brazil becomes, they argue, by this eucharistic swallowing of the Portuguese settler. Poet and philosopher Oswald de Andrade identified anthropophagy as the source for a new poetics and a new politics. For him, after some centuries of indigestion, Bishop Sardinha remains at the bottom of the Brazilian stomach (pg. 233)

I'd also highly recommend Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture by Louise Noble (tragically not on JSTOR), just because I love it. The ties to colonization and colonial rhetoric are strong but fairly diffused throughout the book, though I'd point to Chapter 3, "Flesh Economies in Foreign Worlds: The Unfortunate Traveller and The Sea Voyage," particularly for her discussion of Montaigne.

As in “On Cannibals,” the treatment of bodies in each is played out against a geographically distant backdrop creating an illusory spatial and, at times, temporal distance to represent as cannibalistic the appetites and preoccupations of the English world— and more broadly, the European world (pg. 64)

If you come across any other works on this topic, let me know! i know the post i reblogged was specifically about starvation situations, but that's not quite my area (Obeyesekere has a chapter about it, though, if that's your passion!)