ABSTRACT
Cannibalism, the literal ingestion of one human by another, haunts the foundational moment of European presence in the Caribbean islands, as seen in early visual portrayals of this liminal zone of encounter as a site of human dismemberment and cooking (see Plate 5.1).1 This chapter builds in part on recent explorations of cannibalism by Peter Hulme, Francis Barker, and others of the interlocking meanings of ‘Carib’ and ‘cannibal’ ever since the time of Columbus’s arrival in the New World (Hulme 1986; Barker et al. 1998). Many have asked of this seminal moment and of all that has followed from it: who was eating whom? Was the Caribbean truly a place where Europeans were at risk of being eaten? Or were they in fact the ones who posed a threat to the bodies, health, and lives of the indigenous people of the region, and later to the enslaved and indentured workers who were consumed in the system of plantation slavery and colonial capitalism? From the founding myths of European ‘discovery’, to the blood-sugar topos of the abolitionists, and finally to the popular folk cultures of the Caribbean in their responses to capitalist exploitation, stories of the literal dismembering and eating of others have circulated for centuries in the Caribbean.
