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Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

Online ISBN:
9780252096747
Print ISBN:
9780252038785
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

Njeri Githire
Njeri Githire
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
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Published:
1 November 2014
Online ISBN:
9780252096747
Print ISBN:
9780252038785
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.

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