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

Introduction

Introduction The word “cannibal” is indelibly linked to notions of Americanness since its entry into the Western lexicon coincides with the founding moment of “the Americas.” The Carib Indians’ name, bastardized to canibale by Columbus, came to signify, in the English and Spanish lexicons, anthropophagy: literally, “man-eating.”1 Before Columbus physically observed any such acts, his slurred name for the Indians—in the printed words of his journals—came to signify this horrifying practice. Eric Cheyfitz says that, “beginning with Columbus, the idea of cannibalism developed not as an anthropological fact but as a political fiction that the West employed to justify its exploitation of Native Americans.”2 One conclusion to draw from this imaginative naming is that cannibalism is often a verbally created reality predicated on false evidence, fanciful imagining, or ideologically inflected logic. The birth of such terminology arises from the logic of binaries. This moment is a classic example of Othering. Cannibal Fictions examines the means by which an alien Other is represented for popular consumption by Americans and the ways that this strengthens or destabilizes dominant thinking about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Over time, the subject of cannibalism has variously challenged each of these categories. Originally, representations of cannibalism in U.S. culture both concealed and revealed attitudes about race and about the practices of empire-building, but more recently the subject has been used by authors and cultural producers to critique imperialist policies and the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and class that support them. 3 For Euro-America, the discourse of cannibalism emerged in a crossracial interchange, and recent cases suggest that, even when the interracial situation disappears or is transformed, the figuration of cannibalism retains traces of its racialized origins. Because cannibalism is historically and socially bound, as I contend, to race, its appearance in seemingly non-racialized settings encourages us to “read for race” where we might not normally. Such moments allow readers to see the ways that racialized articulations become tied to other attempts to negotiate differences in gender, sexuality, or class, among other things. My primary interpretative mode is interdisciplinary and postcolonial; I trace the legacies of colonialism that continue to surface in contemporary art, writing, and cultural productions. My readings theorize a corrective to the American Imaginary by examining how the figure of the cannibal disrupts the notion of a mythic national unity, highlighting the disunity that emerged with the nation’s founding and remains today as much a part of the fabric of U.S. national identity as any sense of collective harmony. I live in northern Arizona, a place of great natural beauty, a region rich in cultural history, of central spiritual significance to its indigenous forbearers, but rooted in the bloody and tragic saga of Western colonialism . I teach at a university only a short drive from both the Navajo and Hopi reservations, the latter of which is embroiled in an academic controversy about prehistoric cannibalism among the ancient Anasazi. Since I came here a few years ago, I have been specifically reminded of the truthfulness of my claim that discourses—or fictions, even hypotheses or theses—about cannibalism have tangible, real-world effects. The subject of cannibalism has become increasingly prominent within the academy in the last seven years, an interest that extends beyond the disciplines of anthropology and archeology; to be sure, debates about this issue have persisted within the discipline of anthropology for several decades, sustained if not initiated by William Arens’ The ManEating Myth (1979). The anthropological debates about cannibalism were vigorous enough in 1997 to make the cover of Lingua Franca, an academic publication geared to a general university readership.3 With such widespread interest, it is not surprising that people both inside and outside of the academy have grown interested in the contentions of Christy and Jacqueline Turner’s book, Man Corn (1999), a fastidiously researched account that tries to prove cannibalism was practiced among the Anasazi, ancestors of the living Hopi people, as social control, sacri fice rituals, or perhaps, simply, the product of a “social pathology.” 4 Introduction • Based on bone evidence housed primarily at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, their conclusions are further supported by Hopi narratives that mention cannibalism, in stories collected by an individual who, by many local accounts, is controversial in his own right among the Hopi Tribal Council.4 The Turners’ controversial thesis...