Cannibal Routes: Mapping the Atlantic as a Network of Appropriations.

Abstract

By analyzing texts from different moments of Atlantic colonialism, “Cannibal Routes: Mapping the Atlantic as a Network of Appropriations” presents a new way to see how literary works act in history. The theory of complex networks provides the analytical framework: the transhistorical comparison between four focal texts allows for a schematic rendering of the Atlantic itself as a cultural and economic network that grows in complexity from Columbus to the present. The metaphor of cannibalism models the appropriative mechanism by which links in this Atlantic network are established. Cannibalism—as an illustration of appropriation from “over there”—links points on a map, facilitating the analysis of transatlantic appropriations as a geographic network.

Chapter one explores the rhetorical uses of anthropophagy in Jean de Léry’s 1578 Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. A series of map diagrams in chapter two forms the basis of an analysis of the transatlantic network of voyages developed in the 1789 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Chapter three uses the notion of the complex network to discuss Oswald de Andrade’s 1933 satirical novel Serafim Ponte Grande. Chapter four shows how Maryse Condé’s 2003 novel Histoire de la femme cannibale uses network dynamics to defuse the dehumanizing history of the Atlantic triangle, symbol of the slave trade.

Besides contributing to the literary critical scholarship on each of the four authors considered, this dissertation adds to the interdisciplinary study of the Atlantic. Envisioning the Atlantic of the colonial-postcolonial period as a network of movements—of ships, people, texts, and ideas—provides insight into the literary and historical significance of mobility. Here, the study of literature adds to geographers’ and historians’ understanding of how networks function and what mobilities can mean. As opposed to colonialism’s dehumanizing significance, diaspora models mobility’s positive associations. Diaspora, constituted as a network of affiliations, contrasts with a network of appropriations illustrated by trade, intertextual borrowing, and, most vividly, slavery and cannibalism. The discussion of diaspora and mobility in a network framework provides a new perspective on the power of literature to address large-scale economic patterns.