Insatiable Appetites Imperial Encounters With Cannibals In The North Atlantic World Kelly L Watson by Kelly L. Watson 9780814763476, 0814763472 instant download after payment.

A comparative history of cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modern period
Cannibalism,
for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery.
Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than
animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans
described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote
extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have
witnessed.
In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues
that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans
served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These
colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas
and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples.
They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and
Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was
predicated.
In her close read of letters, travel accounts,
artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and
cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power
intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as
a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered
as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans
came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal
narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate,
cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European
masculinity.
Original and historically grounded, Insatiable
Appetites uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which
difference is understood in the West.