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  • Cannibals and Kitchen Sinks
  • Rob Latham (bio)
Priscilla L. Walton , Our Cannibals, Ourselves. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. x + 172 pp. $35.00.

From serial killers to disease narratives to organ transplants to the spread of mad cow disease, flesh-eating (in one form or another) pervades twentieth- and twenty-first-century existence," Priscilla Walton asserts in her book Our Cannibals, Ourselves (152). As this disparate list suggests, Walton's focus is less on literal cannibalistic acts and practices than it is on "diffuse and metaphoric" (28) deployments of anthropophagous imagery throughout contemporary popular culture. In seven brief yet wide-ranging chapters, Walton surveys cannibal symbolism in classic literary and travel narratives, in coverage of modern pandemics such as Ebola fever, in popular alien-invasion and vampire stories, in panics over mad cow disease, in representations of eating disorders, in serial killers narratives, and in contemporary consumer culture generally, dominated as it is by "various media frenzies and the compulsion to devour" (7). Many of the connections Walton makes, and a number of her readings of what is admittedly an impressively broad range of materials, are quite arresting, but her tendency to treat cannibalism in such a flexible way, to find the metaphor in such a scattered assortment of sites, ultimately fatally attenuates the concept.

Walton herself seems at times concerned that her focus is too vague and wandering. "Although it might seem a stretch to move from flesh-eating to self-starvation," she comments in a section on anorexia nervosa, "it is imperative to remember that when the body [End Page 502] is deprived of food, it begins to consume itself" (108). At another point, while discussing the notorious Tuskeegee experiments, wherein African American men were infected with syphilis, she again acknowledges how "this might seem a stretch in the usage of 'cannibalism'" but affirms that "the consumption of peoples by other peoples does not stretch the term beyond its scope of reference" (41). Unfortunately, the fact is that, again and again throughout these pages, the concept is strained to its metaphoric limits: the process of vaccination is cannibalistic because "matter from one source, often human, is injected into another and is consumed in various ways for the host's physical maintenance" (49); disease outbreaks and "biological onslaughts" (57) of all kinds can be viewed as cannibalistic since they highlight "the linkage between cultural practices, pathology, and consumption" (40). These examples could be readily extended: indeed, each chapter begins with a more or less far-fetched assertion of the presence of "cannibalistic tropes" (36) in a given topic or corpus, then proceeds to offer a Wikipedia-level overview of the subject, interspersed with a few close readings of randomly selected texts. Chapter 3, for example, surveys the "cultural fears of contamination" (72) embedded in postwar body-snatcher and vampire narratives, which allegorize the lurking fear of communism or homosexuality, both of which are imagined as constituting "threats to the person and to the body politic, [as] does cannibalism" (68). Even in chapters where the cannibalistic imagery is direct and overt, such as chapter 6 (on serial killers), Walton does not stop spinning out tenuous connections, roping in tales of organ theft and urban rioting, identifying this eclectic and seemingly indiscriminate method as "a postmodern displacement paradigm" (152).

A basic argument does underlie the haphazard concatenation of materials. According to Walton, from its origins in Western discourse, the deployment of cannibalism has served as "an 'Othering' stratagem": initially a way of demonizing foreign peoples encountered during colonial exploration, it was converted, during the twentieth century, into a way of imagining "new threats to the home space" (152), the "body politic." Walton very effectively catalogues the racist fears animating popular coverage of epidemics emerging from Africa, such as AIDS and Ebola, arguing that "cannibalism has [End Page 503] moved from 'over there' to 'in here' through viral contagions" (60)—yet one wonders why she needs to extrapolate these anxieties from anthropophagic myths (fantasies of incorporation) rather than from other long-standing racist metaphors relating to dirt and disease (fantasies of pollution). Walton essentially collapses the complex lexicon of Western racism into a single trope, but even this dubious conflation does...

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