Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism by Champion, Giulia;

Short description:

This book brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This collection of thoughtful and though-provoking scholarly contributions sheds light on and suggests the important of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

Long description:

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.

"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

Table of Contents:

Preface: Bites Here and There

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

Giulia Champion

1. ‘I’ll play the cook’: Titus Andronicus and the Cannibalism of Revenge from Seneca to Julie Taymor’s Titus





Romola Nuttall









2. Cannibalism and Femininity: From the Old English Judith to　Game of Thrones’ Arya Stark





Roberta Marangi









3. ‘You eat or you die’: Sixth Extinction Cannibalism in Contemporary Speculative Fiction





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









4. Cannibalism and the Ancient Novel Revisited





Edmund P. Cueva









5. The Medieval Roots of Anthropophagy: Stereotypes, Metaphors and Practices





Angelica Aurora Montanari









6. Iconology and Metaphors in Viennese Actionism: Critical Actions against a Cannibalistic Society





Nicola Viviani









7. ‘We’ve both been his brides’: NBC’s Hannibal, Cannibalism and Psychological Violence in Platonic Relationships





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









8. Criminal Conversion and Cannibalistic Contrition in an Early Modern Spanish Broadsheet Ballad





Stacey L. Parker Aronson









9. Constructing Transgression: Cannibalism, Witchcraft and Womanhood in Lo Stregozzo





Laura Scalabrella Spada









10. The Better to Eat You With: The Anthropophagy Plots of Fairy Tales





Silvia E. Storti









11. Cannibalising Violence: Rethinking the Cannibal in order to Theorise an Unthinkability of Sexual Violence





Cecilia Cienfuegos and Ana Abril






Part IV (De)Meatifying and Digesting the Other






Introduction – Decolonising Cannibalism from Travel Writing to Brazilian Antropofagia









12. ‘Savages are but shades of ourselves’: Central African Cannibals in Herbert Ward’s Narratives (1890-1910)





Sophie Dulucq









13. Gastronomes of the Old School: American Iterations of the Cannibal Idea





Nicholas A. B. Kahn









14. Neo-Cannibalistic Spaces: Revisiting Museum Practice through Literary Fiction





Louise Logan-Smith









15. The Ethnographic Effect or, Antropofagia, its Past and Future

Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo