Savage Hunger: Cannibalism and the Discourse on Slavery in the United States and Caribbean.
详细信息
文摘
My dissertation argues that cannibalism afforded Anglophone writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a powerful conceptual tool for making sense of slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. From the height of the transatlantic slave trade to the final vitriolic decades of proslavery defense in the antebellum United States,the purported cannibalism of Africans provided slavery advocates with a ready shorthand for barbaric inferiority that became an excuse for enslavement. Meanwhile,the figurative dimensions of anthropophagy provided the framework for compelling critiques of human exploitation. In the late eighteenth century,for example,British abolitionists used the trope of blood-soaked sugar to convince consumers that they were cannibalizing Caribbean slaves. In the nineteenth century,Frederick Douglass characterized slavery as "greedily devouring our hard earnings and feeding himself upon our flesh." By understanding how cannibalism entered and shaped the discourse on slavery,we gain crucial insight into the ways race and power were perceived,constructed,and challenged not only by slaves and slaveholders,but by politicians,abolitionists,and consumers. My approach combines the examination of rare archival materials like political cartoons and blackface minstrel songsters with extended close readings of major literary texts by writers including Herman Melville,Nathaniel Hawthorne,and Charles Chesnutt. Moving from Great Britain to the Caribbean to the United States,and from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries,my dissertation exposes connections between anti-sugar campaigns,free soil disputes,blackface minstrel tropes,and lynching accounts. In the process,I establish the ongoing relevance of figurative cannibalism to race formation by uncovering patterns of racialized thought that not only persisted long after emancipation,but remain influential today.