Il sapore dell'Altro. Antropofagia e letteratura

Abstract

The present study tries to redefine the concept of anthropophagy as an act through which to read affirmative ethics and subjectivities, rethinking the relationship between Self and Other, between human and non-human, between different bodies, foods and incorporations. In short, anthropophagy is an enabling practice, a practice of recognition of otherness, consisting in the incorporation of small portions of the aforementioned otherness. The relationship between the eater and the eaten is a relationship of becoming-Other and suggests that encounters with the Other are to be considered in terms of nourishment, joyful sustenance and desiring appetite. Shaken and tugged by the many energies and screaming cosmic bodies, the anthropophagus screams consumption, as suggested by the heterogeneous speculative contingent crowded between the pages of this work which ranges from anthropology (Lévi-Strauss, Harris, Arens, Kilgour, Viveiros de Castro), literary criticism (Bachtin, Genet, Brooks), postcolonialism (Said, Fanon, Bhabha, Mbembe), modernism (De Andrade), performance (Schechner, Artaud, De Marinis), post-structuralism (Foucault, Deleuze), to capitalist (Dominy, Agamben) and feminist criticism (Sceats, Ellmann). However, before these representations or practices mentioned above could be read affirmatively, the cannibal had to be freed from the grip and constraints of that Eurocentric Manichaeism generating a concept of otherness and obsessive diversity towards everything that is not Western. Freeing the liminalized Other from the narratives and myths that surround him means having the possibility of developing imaginaries enhanced by the ideas we dream of in our material encounters with other bodies. These assumptions, theoretically analyzed in the first part of the book, are then developed practically in the remainder of the volume, applied to a series of literary (Atwood, McCarthy, Lispector, Soyinka) and visual (Bourgeois, Nitsch) products, in which, although respecting of their peculiarities, a critique of the present emerges paradigmatically rendered through acts of incorporation and cannibalism.