Cannibalism and the Colonial World

In this 1998 book, an international team from a variety of disciplines discusses the historical and cultural significance of cannibalism.

Francis Barker (Edited by), Peter Hulme (Edited by), Margaret Iversen (Edited by)

9780521629089, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 August 1998

324 pages, 13 b/w illus.
21.8 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.396 kg

'I doubt it there is another book quite like this one … fascinating.' Cultural Survival

In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, published in 1998, an international team of specialists from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, literature, art history - discusses the historical and cultural significance of western fascination with the topic of cannibalism. Addressing the image as it appears in a series of texts - popular culture, film, literature, travel writing and anthropology - the essays range from classical times to contemporary critical discourse. Cannibalism and the Colonial World examines western fascination with the figure of the cannibal and how this has impacted on the representation of the non-western world. This group of literary and anthropological scholars analyses the way cannibalism continues to exist as a term within colonial discourse and places the discussion of cannibalism in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies.

1. Introduction: The cannibal scene Peter Hulme
2. Rethinking anthropophagy William Arens
3. Cannibal feasts in nineteenth-century Fiji: seamen's yarns and the ethnographic imagination Gananath Obeyesekere
4. Brazilian anthropophagy revisited Sergio Luiz Prado Bellei
5. Lapses in taste: 'cannibal-tropicalist' cinema and the Brazilian aesthetic of underdevelopment Luis Madureira
6. Ghost stories, bone flutes, cannibal countermemory Graham Huggan
7. Cronos and the political economy of vampirism: notes on a historical constellation John Kraniauskas
8. Fee fie fo fum: the child in the jaws of the story Marina Warner
9. Cannibalism qua capitalism: the metaphorics of accumulation in Marx, Conrad, Shakespeare and Marlowe Jerry Phillips
10. Consumerism, or the cultural logic of late cannibalism Crystal Bartolovich
11. The function of cannibalism at the present time Maggie Kilgour.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]