Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

Bites Here and There

Giulia Champion, Giulia Champion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

Part I

Cannibals with (Pitch)Forks

Introduction

A Severed Head on a Silver Platter: Bloody Banquets, Revenge Cannibalism and Future Foodways

Giulia Champion

For the first course of this edited collection, we serve up three chapters that establish a genealogy of cannibalism across different cultural productions. Romola Nuttall’s, Roberta Marangi’s and Nora Castle’s chapters consider past, present and future instances of anthropophagy, metaphorical and literal, around the (dinner) table. Bloody banquets are one of the most ancient forms of cannibalism in the western canon, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the Scandinavian Poetic Edda and early modern drama to contemporary speculative fiction. Part I, as well as this introduction, will foreground cannibalism around the table. Part II, III and IV, as discussed in the preface, will continue to investigate different forms and shapes of cannibalism across cultures and disciplines. It is important to note that the terms ‘anthropophagy’ and ‘cannibalism’, though often used interchangeably, are fundamentally different. Anthropofagos, literally human-eater, and androfagos, literally male-eater, were words that existed to designate humanoid creatures and monsters that fed on human flesh, identifying the eaten as human, but not the eater; hence, ‘anthropophagy’ does not necessarily indicate intraspecies consumption, while ‘cannibalism’ does. Moreover, anthropophagy, in particular, plays a crucial role in relation to Brazilian modernism and decolonial studies as it is discussed in more details in Cecilia Cienfuegos and Ana Abril’s chapter in Part III and Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo’s chapter closing Part IV.

The distinction between these two terms, therefore, is critical as it determines whether the eater is considered human or not, as Peter Hulme argues: ‘Human beings who eat other human beings have always been placed on the very borders of humanity. They are not regarded as inhuman because if they were animals their behaviour would be natural and could not cause the outrage and fear that “cannibalism” has always provoked.’¹ This notion plays a crucial role throughout this collection since conceptions of self and Otherness are defined and delimited in relation to eating practices. This is noted, for instance, by Maggie Kilgour who writes that.

[t]he need for food exposes the vulnerability of individual identity, enacted at a wider social level in the need for exchanges, communion, and commerce with others, through which the individual is absorbed into a larger corporate body. Eating is the most basic of all these needs, which it can also stand for, and in most cultures it is regulated by strict social practices that determine what can and what cannot be eaten. As ‘you are what you eat,’ eating is a means of asserting and controlling individual and also cultural identity.²

Eating materialises the body and social practices, which become markers to regulate and define human categories and humanity itself, allowing cannibalism to act as a lens for studying identity and power relations and dynamics, as is the focus of all the authors in this collection. A final, additional, difference between the terms cannibalism and anthropophagy connects the former to histories of colonialism and imperialism given its strong link with the Caribbean and origins from Columbus’s wilful misunderstanding of indigenous languages. This misnomer subsequently spreads through the dissemination of Columbus’s Diario de abordo. This will be discussed in more details in the introduction to and the chapters in Part IV of this collection.

It is also important to note that not all cannibalism involves literally consuming human flesh. Indeed, throughout this collection contributors engage with both ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ cannibalism, as the chapters in this Part I establish. While Nuttall and Castle consider instances of literal cannibalism – people literally eating other people – they bear in mind metaphorical forms of consumption, as does Marangi when she investigates Judith’s cannibalisation of Holofernes in the Old English Judith. Hence, throughout this collection, the verb ‘to cannibalise’ refers strictly to a metaphorical act. Part I, in particular, considers both what it means to be a cannibal and whether one can still be considered one when one is fed human meat unwittingly. This is crucial in all chapters of this section, from the opening one by Nuttall in her focus on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in Julie Taymor’s 1999 filmic adaptation of the play in her chapter entitled ‘“I’ll play the cook”: Titus Andronicus and the Cannibalism of Revenge from Seneca to Julie Taymor’s Titus’. This chapter re-focuses scholarly attention given to the play onto the episode of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Preface: Bites Here and There
• Part I: Cannibals with (Pitch)Forks
• Part II: The Anthropophagus Complex
• Part III: Not Just Another Piece of Meat
• Part IV: (De)Meatifying and Digesting the Other
• Index