Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (review)

Winner of the 2005 Premio Casa de las Américas prize for essay, Jáuregui's monograph is an Easterly study of a master trope of Latin American culture, that of the cannibal. Reminiscent of Robert Ernst Curtius's analyses of topoi koine (common places) of medieval and Renaissance literature or Karl Spitzer's philological analyses of dominant cultural themes (such as harmony), Jáuregui's far-ranging textual study traces the development and deployment of the figure of the cannibal in Spanish and Portuguese writing in and with reference to Latin America.

As Jáuregui points out, cannibal is one of the first neologisms produced by the contact between Spain and the so-called New World (13), being a form proposed by Columbus and derived from the tribe of the Caribes of what came to be called the West Indies, a tribe reputed to consume human flesh. The cannibal, thus, provides a founding narrative for the Spanish—and subsequently Portuguese—conquest in that the accounts of people who consume human flesh justify what becomes the massive apparatus of the conquest for their exploitation, enslavement, torment, and extermination. All other allegations as to their essential nonhumanity, such as soulless animals with black anuses to worshippers of heathen (and, indeed, Satanic) deities, flow from this originating pre-anthropological attribution. The fact that such a structuring trope is grounded in the body of indigenous peoples, refers to the circulation and exchange of bodies, and determines the fundamental precaution towards the conquered by the conqueror grounds the ethos of the conquest in motifs of horror, repugnance, and vituperation that underlie the vast production of cultural responses to the indigenous peoples. Jáuregui's study is a marvelously eloquent and painstakingly documented analysis of those cultural responses.

If caníbal is a foundational trope, Caliban (of Shakespearean origin) is a second-order trope, in the sense that, at least as it has come to be used in Latin America (cf. the paradigmatic use by Roberto Fernández Retamar), it grounds the (re)construction of the indigenous (and then mestizo) Latin American as the product of the transcultural consumption of the violent exchange between peoples of the conquest. Such (re)constructions range from the proposals of prelapsarian noble savages to cosmic races, passing through antropofagismo, from the 1928 manifesto by Oswald de Andrade, whose avowed cannibal logic holds that Latin American culture can only be achieved through the ritualistic consumption all cultural sources, but especially that of the reputed enemy of European influence. Such a posture, which can be viewed very much as a prefiguration of a viable Latin American postcolonialism, stands in juxtaposition to the ultranationalism of Brazilian literature (and other Latin American ones) at the time, as well as to academicist insistence on strict adherence to European models.

Jáuregui covers an immense amount of cultural material in this immensely readable and engrossing monograph, and there is much here to orient a considerable amount of subsequent scholarship.