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Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Online ISBN:
9780814760499
Print ISBN:
9780814763476
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World

Published:
24 April 2015
Online ISBN:
9780814760499
Print ISBN:
9780814763476
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed. This book argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated. The book focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. It reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity.

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