Cannibal
Fictions
American Explorations
of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Jeff Berglund
Ray and Pat Browne Books
"Jeff Berglund succeeds in demonstrating
how fictive constructions of cannibalism have changed or morphed
into different forms or presentations, but always with pernicious
cultural overtones and effects."–Douglas
A. Noverr, Michigan State University
Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals
have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence
outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination,
the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as
Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic
collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts.
Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods
in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War
I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the
post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously
question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum,
in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals,"
served up an alien "other" for popular consumption,
while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series
tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements
into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the
twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism
variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic
ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried
Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering
an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an
element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation).
Recurring motifs in writing by contemporary American Indian authors
Gerald Vizenor, Anna Lee Walters, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman
Alexie suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically,
laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent
efforts to use allegations of cannibalism in China to energize
his pro-life agenda testify still further to the currency and
pervasiveness of this powerful trope.
By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming
one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call
into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus
unum.
Jeff Berglund is assistant professor of English at Northern Arizona University.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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August 2006
LC: 2005022820
260 pp. 6 x 9
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