The Sign Of The Cannibal

Download or read book The Sign of the Cannibal written by Geoffrey Sanborn and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring cannibalism in the work of Herman Melville, Sanborn argues that Melville produced a postcolonial perspective even as nations were building colonial empires.

Download or read book Signs of Masculinity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinity is becoming an increasingly popular area of study in areas as diverse as sociology, politics and cultural studies, yet significant research is lacking into connections between masculinity and literature. Signs of Masculinity aims at beginning to fill the gap. Starting with an introduction to, and intervention within, numerous debates concerning the cultural construction of various masculinities, the volume then continues with an investigation of representations of masculinity in literature from 1700 to the present. Close readings of texts are intended to demonstrate that masculinity is not a theoretical abstract, but a definitive textual and cultural phenomenon that needs to be recognised in the study of literature. It is hoped that the wide-ranging essays, which raise numerous issues, and are written from a variety of methodological approaches, will appeal to undergraduate, postgraduates and lecturers interest in the crucial but under-researched area of masculinity.

Download or read book Signs of Dissent written by Dawn Fulton and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits. By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean," "African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.

Download or read book Cannibal Fictions written by Jeff Berglund and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2006 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tattooing the World written by Juniper Ellis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Juniper Ellis traces the origins and significance of modern tattoo in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, travelers, missionaries, scientists, and such writers as Herman Melville, Margaret Mead, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel." --book cover.

Download or read book Hans Staden's True History written by Hans Staden and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-16 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1550 the German adventurer Hans Staden was serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast. While out hunting, he was captured by the Tupinambá, an indigenous people who had a reputation for engaging in ritual cannibalism and who, as allies of the French, were hostile to the Portuguese. Staden’s True History, first published in Germany in 1557, tells the story of his nine months among the Tupi Indians. It is a dramatic first-person account of his capture, captivity, and eventual escape. Staden’s narrative is a foundational text in the history and European “discovery” of Brazil, the earliest European account of the Tupi Indians, and a touchstone in the debates on cannibalism. Yet the last English-language edition of Staden’s True History was published in 1929. This new critical edition features a new translation from the sixteenth-century German along with annotations and an extensive introduction. It restores to the text the fifty-six woodcut illustrations of Staden’s adventures and final escape that appeared in the original 1557 edition. In the introduction, Neil L. Whitehead discusses the circumstances surrounding the production of Staden’s narrative and its ethnological significance, paying particular attention to contemporary debates about cannibalism. Whitehead illuminates the value of Staden’s True History as an eyewitness account of Tupi society on the eve before its collapse, of ritual war and sacrifice among Native peoples, and of colonial rivalries in the region of Rio de Janeiro. He chronicles the history of the various editions of Staden’s narrative and their reception from 1557 until the present. Staden’s work continues to engage a wide range of readers, not least within Brazil, where it has recently been the subject of two films and a graphic novel.

Download or read book Cannibal Talk written by Gananath Obeyesekere and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. Cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism, he argues. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. Cannibal Talk considers how the colonial intrusion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of "conspicuous anthropophagy."