1st Edition
Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism Bites Here and There
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.
Preface: Bites Here and There
Part I Cannibals with (Pitch)Forks
Introduction – A Severed Head on a Silver Platter: Bloody Banquets, Revenge Cannibalism and Future Foodways
Giulia Champion
- ‘I’ll play the cook’: Titus Andronicus and the Cannibalism of Revenge from Seneca to Julie Taymor’s Titus
- Cannibalism and Femininity: From the Old English Judith to Game of Thrones’ Arya Stark
- ‘You eat or you die’: Sixth Extinction Cannibalism in Contemporary Speculative Fiction
- Cannibalism and the Ancient Novel Revisited
- The Medieval Roots of Anthropophagy: Stereotypes, Metaphors and Practices
- Iconology and Metaphors in Viennese Actionism: Critical Actions against a Cannibalistic Society
- ‘We’ve both been his brides’: NBC’s Hannibal, Cannibalism and Psychological Violence in Platonic Relationships
- Criminal Conversion and Cannibalistic Contrition in an Early Modern Spanish Broadsheet Ballad
- Constructing Transgression: Cannibalism, Witchcraft and Womanhood in Lo Stregozzo
- The Better to Eat You With: The Anthropophagy Plots of Fairy Tales
- Cannibalising Violence: Rethinking the Cannibal in order to Theorise an Unthinkability of Sexual Violence
- ‘Savages are but shades of ourselves’: Central African Cannibals in Herbert Ward’s Narratives (1890-1910)
- Gastronomes of the Old School: American Iterations of the Cannibal Idea
- Neo-Cannibalistic Spaces: Revisiting Museum Practice through Literary Fiction
- The Ethnographic Effect or, Antropofagia, its Past and Future
Romola Nuttall
Roberta Marangi
Nora Castle
Part II The Anthropophagus Complex
Introduction – The Anthropophagus Complex: Despotic and Overbearing Ogre Figures in Ancient and Medieval Texts and in Psychoanalysis
Giulia Champion
Edmund P. Cueva
Angelica Aurora Montanari
Nicola Viviani
Shehzad Raj
Part III Not Just Another Piece of Meat
Introduction – Not Just Another Piece of Meat: The Sexual and Epistemological Violence of Gendered Otherness
Giulia Champion
Stacey L. Parker Aronson
Laura Scalabrella Spada
Silvia E. Storti
Cecilia Cienfuegos and Ana Abril
Part IV (De)Meatifying and Digesting the Other
Introduction – Decolonising Cannibalism from Travel Writing to Brazilian Antropofagia
Sophie Dulucq
Nicholas A. B. Kahn
Louise Logan-Smith
Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo
Biography
Giulia Champion is an Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her PhD investigated the tropes of extraction and cannibalism as decolonial approaches to literature emerging from the American and African continents. She is currently working on transdisciplinary climate change communication, material histories and the blue and energy humanities.
"Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There is a wide-ranging collection of suggestive and lively explorations of a broad variety of evocative instances of figural cannibalism. These essays make a compelling case for the prevailing relevance of the metaphor across multiple disciplines and fields of inquiry. Thoughtfully reassessing cannibalism in the light of recent theoretical perspectives and approaches, the volume’s contributors advocate spiritedly and provocatively for the concept’s enduring potential as a mode of illuminating distinct aspects of human history and socio-economic relations." Luís Madureira, Professor of African Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison