Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Epilogue: Abortion Politics, Focus on the Family, and U.S. Feminists in Beijing

Epilogue Abortion Politics, Focus on the Family, and U.S. Feminists in Beijing China has forced abortions after your firstborn. What do they do with so many fetuses? One clinic alone can pile up seven, maybe eight thousand fetuses a year. You know what? They’re using them babies for health food, that’s what! Cuttin’ up and cookin’ babies to eat. . . . That, my friend, is what the New World Order is bringing us. Ed Dosh, quoted in Marc Cooper’s “Camouflage Days, E-mail Nights” Cannibalism throughout the world had largely been eradicated—until now. In the past it was uncivilized pagan tribes people, or those without any belief in any form of god [sic] that ate human flesh. A captive and later escaped Jesuit, one of the early martyrs of North America, was made to show his disfigured hands—their fingers had been gnawed off by Indian women—publicly in France. He returned to evangelize the same Indians. Father David C. Trosch, “Cannibalism: Has Legal Abortion Degraded Human Life to a Gourmet Food Substance?” www.trosch.org/life/cannibalism.html Before I leave you, like Ishmael floating to safety on the coffin of the dead cannibal Queequeg, I want to consider one further case study that illustrates how the subject of cannibalism or “the cannibalistic” is always 171 materially connected to race and imperialism and thus, by extension, to religion, gender, and the political. As has been the case throughout, I borrow from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s thinking in Decolonizing Methodologies where she suggests that imperialism is about “economic expansion ” and “the subjugation of ‘others’”; it is an “idea or spirit with many forms of realization” and “a discursive field of knowledge” that resists easy, painless transformation (21). This book has concentrated on the way that imperialism operates in the imaginative realm and how such representational strategies, rather that simply perpetuating racism and imperialism—which can certainly happen when such matters are uncritically consumed—can lead to revolution, to empowerment, to resistance , to greater knowledge of the constructedness of categories of race, sexuality, and gender. In the introduction I noted how critic Geoffrey Sanborn has drawn attention to the way that critics analyze the figure of the cannibal, reminding us that writing about the cannibal is another means of cementing meaning. He rightly cautions critics not to assume that the subject lies outside of the realm of language; all the same, he warns against making assumptions about the forms of language used to describe the subject . For example, he contends: “To use cannibalism as a derogatory epithet is thus to contribute to the sedimentation of the image of the cannibal, to help close off the modes of analysis that would call its origin into question. Even when we are speaking metaphorically, or analyzing other writers’ metaphors, we should be mindful of the colonial provenance of language we use and attempt to use it otherwise.”1 Although I have made every attempt to follow Sanborn’s charge in duly examining the scene and context of production of the cannibal and the subtleties of rhetorical maneuvering, in the examples I’ve chosen there is no escaping this colonial provenance, for the English word cannibal takes us back to Columbus, to the Columbiad, to Empire, to imperialism , to colonization. Thus, for me, the subject of cannibalism is a palimpsest of the ways the discourses of imperialism—even resistance to such forces—have circulated, or have revealed the means by which imperialism operates. Before I move into my specific example, I want to introduce a brief excerpt from Alice Walker’s “The Right to Life: What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?”: What can the white man say to the black woman? For four hundred years he ruled over the black woman’s womb. Let us be clear. In the barracoons and along the slave shipping coasts of Africa, for more 172 Epilogue • than twenty generations, it was he who dashed our babies’ brains out against the rocks. . . . [B]lack women were sacrificed to the profit the white man could make from harnessing their bodies and their children’s bodies to the cotton gin. . . . Where are the children of the Cherokee, my great grandmother’s people? Gone. Where are the children of the Blackfoot? Gone. Where are the children of the Lakota? Gone. Of the Cheyenne? Of the Chippewa? Of the...