Cannibalism and the Colonial World (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 323 follow any specific pattern but, to the contrary, variety is the norm. This variety, nonetheless, does achieve its purpose in getting the reader acquainted with a sense of what neighbois diink of each other and also with a sense of how the line that divides this hemisphere into North and South is just a cultuial constiuct. In this line, the bridges laid by these wiiteis give the illusion that they have giasped the constitutive nature ofthe Other when their words are nothing else but pale reflections of themselves. Rony Garrido The University of Arizona Cannibalism and the Cohnial World Cambridge University Press, 1998 By Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen Cannibalism constitutes a way to make sense of others and ourselves as well, a trope that involves the feai ofthe dissolution of identity and conversely, a model of incorporation of difference. The topic of cannibalism has provoked considerable academic attention. In anthropology there is an attempt to undeistand it as an institutional foim of aggression, a demographic control system arising from the need for protein, a symbolic ritual by which certain qualities ofthe person consumed might be obtained, or a ritual system for constructing group identity. Cannibalism and the Colonial World explores , across a variety of contexts, different narratives about cannibalism, its disciplinary and historical construction and function(s), and its cultural significance in "Western culture." Arens opens the volume with a response to nearly 20 years of criticism. He presents a detailed textual analysis of the pseudo-academic causal link between alleged cannibalism and Kuru disease in New Guinea, and exposes the ensemble of self-referential, eurocentric narratives and myths that support such a linkage. Likewise, Giannath Obeyesekere—in one of the most damaging and rigorous studies against die often-quoted testimonial evidence and classic colonial ethno-narratives that sustain Fijian antiopophagy—suggests theit fictional and literary attributes. Sergio Prado-Bellei criticizes the frequent aesthetic trivialization of the Brazilian "Antropofagia " movement, as elaborated in die late 1920s by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade. He sustains that the prevalent postmodern reading of "Antropofagia" while celebrating a culture formed by constant cultural encounteis and reciprocal "digestion," neutralizes the Utopian dimensions of Andrade's thought. Beliefs analysis constitutes a refreshing approximation to the subject, even though, for moments, it overestimates the political magnitude of Antropofagia, which in fact was initially conceived between a playful primitivism and an aesthetic response to the appetite foi modernization that the young and prosperous coffeeplantation elite had. Luis Madureira's essay deals with the different attitudes ofthe Brazilian modernist movement towards modernization and national culture, and particularly the lattei Cinema Novo "return" to Modernism during the 60s-70s dictatoiship. In Pedro de Andrade's film Macunaima (1969), an adaptation Mario de Andrade 's novel (1928), the national myths of identity and progress (rhetoric obsessions ofthe military regime) are satirized. In the film Como era Gostoso o meu Frances (Nelson Peteiia dos Santos 1971) there is a subveisive re-reading ofthe historical archive. Both movies address—as the modernists have done before—the problem of national identity in terms ofthe mythical indigenous origin and the "problem " of cultural influence; but what the movies evoke (Modernism and foundational colonial texts) has been somehow, at once, actualized and abandoned. Beyond the ethnographical dispute, cannibalism is a recurring presence in Caribbean narratives of identity, a fable that could be read against the grain, or from the tradition ofthe oppressed^ Benjamin proposed, in order to trigger the ability for the past to redeem the present. Graham Huggan studies, in rwo samples in Guyana's literature , the subveisive powet of ghosts (the cannibal being one of them) as mnemonic devices 324 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and Foucaultian exercises of narrative counter memory and, following Fanon, he addresses the problems of split identities, mulatto-Creole consciousness and historical awareness in a postcolonial scenario. John Kraniauskas explotes unexpected postcolonial resonances within "petiphetal" tales of vampirism. He concentrates in the analysis of Guillermo del Toros movie Cronos (1992), a film inscribed not only into the European and North Ameiican tradition of vampire horror stories, but also into the Mexican tiadition of nairatives of revenants, and...