Insatiable Appetites

Book Review| August 01 2018 Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. By Watson, Kelly L.. Early American Places. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 239 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Surekha Davies Surekha Davies Western Connecticut State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Hispanic American Historical Review (2018) 98 (3): 516–518. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-6933666 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Surekha Davies; Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 August 2018; 98 (3): 516–518. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-6933666 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsHispanic American Historical Review Search Advanced Search The charge of cannibalism is a classic trope via which Europeans have historically legitimized imperialism. In recent decades, cannibalism has featured in critiques of anthropology and in acrimonious debates about when anthropophagy really happened and the expertise required to establish that it had happened. Kelly L. Watson's Insatiable Appetites investigates the mutual influences of imperial contexts and discourses of cannibalism in the North Atlantic. It seeks in particular “the role that gender played in labeling a group cannibalistic and in the consequences of this label,” which “was, and continues to be, simultaneously a racialized and gendered figure” (p. 8). Watson argues for “a recentering of gender in the analysis of the discourse of cannibalism,” a historiography that has typically focused “on the connection between cannibalism, savagery, and race” (pp. 2–3). While barbarians were those who defied the norms of “gendered power and... Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Issue Section: Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries You do not currently have access to this content

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