Insatiable Appetites

"Compelling. . . . By focusing on cannibalism, sex, and gender . . . [presents] the relationship between discourse and power in the unfolding of empire." —Carole Blackburn, The University of British Columbia

 

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.

 

In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues that the rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a practical purpose. European colonizers had to forge new identities in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. 

 

In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she 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.

 

Original and historically grounded, Insatiable Appetites uncovers the ways in which difference is understood in the West.

 

"An engaging comparative study of how a . . . long-standing trope. . . . became a mainstay of European imperial thought." ―Journal of Interdisciplinary History

 

"This fine book follows untraveled paths, combining fascinating discoveries in new primary sources with refreshing interpretations." ―Journal of American History

 

"Insightful." ―Choice