Cannibal Writes

"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. In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire 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, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As she shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, Cannibal Writes 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"-- "Within the field of postcolonial studies, colonial and imperial domination have frequently been connected to metaphors of eating and consumption. At the extreme, cannibalism works as a colonialist trope, and becomes an overarching framework for addressing issues of self, difference, and otherness. In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these metaphors of consumption, specifically in works by Caribbean and Indian Ocean women writers in Haiti, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe. Through wide ranging theoretical exploration and insightful readings of texts in both English and French, this project focuses on the visceral appeal of alimentary metaphors and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, political economy, and migration. Githire also explores some of the ways in which cannibalism has surfaced in some contemporary migration debates. The project is ambitiously comparative, including a wide range of well known and lesser known writers in both Caribbean and Indian Ocean contexts--geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but which are rarely brought together in the same study"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.