American explorations of colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Berglund, Jeff
- Publish Year
- 2006
- Shelfmark
- VS 54 2006
- Thesaurus
- romans, theater, films, racisme, seksisme, etnocentrisme, kolonialisme, etniciteit, indianen, schrijvers, 20e eeuw, Verenigde Staten
- Description
- Cannibal Fictions brings together two periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I 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.