Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas (review)

The metaphor of cannibalism has been a constant in the discourses of identity formation within the Americas. It is well known that Christopher Columbus in his letter to Luis de Santángel (1493) "discovers" the presence of man-eaters in the lands he encounters. From this moment onward, the anthropophagic subject becomes alternatively a cipher symbolizing the menace and purported savagery of the American continent (as in the narratives of Jean de Léry and Hans Staden) and of the Edenic quality of the New World, embodied by the (cannibal) bon sauvage that is contrasted with a problematic European body politic (as in Michel de Montaigne's Des Cannibales [1580]). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, cannibalism still serves in the formulation of national identities. Most famously, the Brazilian modernist movement, which officially began in 1922, declared anthropophagy as the condition sin qua non of Brazil's national identity. This idea is postulated in Oswald de Andrade's "Anthropophagous Manifest" ("Manifesto antropófago," 1928). Referring to the indigenous Tupis' custom of consuming their slain enemies in order to appropriate their strengths, Oswald de Andrade proposed that Brazilian intellectuals and artists too, should devour the products of foreign (mainly European) cultures, assimilate their beneficial aspects and, adequately digested, transform these cultural fares - mixed with a good dose of national elements - into an unique, truly Brazilian cultural stew. What the modernists did not thematize as overtly was the waste produced by the "digestive" process, the detritus that inevitably accompanies ingestion and digestion, or, in metaphorical terms, the remains of the assimilatory process.

It is precisely on these remains, the remainder, that Zita Nunes' book, Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas focuses. Nunes investigates how the formulation/s of national identities that directly or indirectly rely on the metaphor of cannibalism to delineate a unified national body, inevitably generate a remainder that cannot, or will not, be successfully incorporated into the national corpus. If suppressed or silenced, this remainder will haunt the (generally violent) construction of a national identity based on a discourse of cannibal democracy. However, if acknowledged, the remainder can lead to a more productive understanding of and dialogue with difference within the nation, and thus to a truly democratic model of nationhood. Cannibal Democracy centers on the issue of how, in the framework of narratives of Brazilian, North American and Caribbean national identity, racial otherness is thematized, assimilated and remaindered. For Nunes, democratic articulations of nationhood rely precisely on the exclusion via absorption model that affirms the identity of the consuming subject while fabricating an indigestible remainder. She elucidates this through various literary and non-literary (including visual) texts that span the beginning of the twentieth century and reveal how questions of democracy, citizenship and race are of ongoing importance in our ostensibly "post-national" world, and, some would argue, "post-black" world.

Nunes begins her discussion of the confluence between a cannibalistic model of democracy and, by extension, national unity, race and the remainder produced by the convergence of these elements with an analysis of Mário de An-drade's modernist novel, Macunaíma, published, as indicated by Nunes in the same year (1928) as Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagous manifesto. Lauded as the fictional manifestation of the cannibalistic cultural logic proposed by Oswald de Andrade, Macunaíma has often been interpreted as distilling the essence of a Brazilian hybrid cultural identity. Nonetheless, as Nunes points out, the novel's underlying meaning contradicts the notion of cannibalism as a synonym for racial and cultural democracy. Rather, Mário de Andrade's rhapsody speaks of the exclusion of the African and indigenous element from the body politic. They become, in the words of Nunes, "remaindered" and, as such, connote resistance to complete assimilation. Nunes' interpretation of both the modernist novel and her examination of Gilberto Freyre's canonical study Casa Grande e Senzala (1933) confront the reader with a novel way of understanding two...