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Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Ray...
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Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Ray...
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by Jeff Berglund
Sales Rank : 1847185
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Hardcover: 252 pages
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press June 21, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0299215903
ISBN-13: 978-0299215903
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Product Review
"In this highly original work, 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. What is particularly original in his approach is the range of cultural texts he analyzes, from P. T. Barnum's exhibition of the so-called 'Fiji cannibals,' to popular fiction and film, to the Internet, to Web sites on abortion."—Douglas A. Noverr, Michigan State University
Product Description
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 contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China 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.
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