Bodies of Exclusion on Trans-Imperial Literatures, 1900-1952

• In Event: La economía simbólica del cuerpo latinoamericano: transacciones y tránsitos.

Abstract

Brazilian literary representations of cannibalism and Japanese “poison woman” (dokufu) narratives share no discursive, geographic or intertextual links. The trope of cannibalism first appeared in sixteenth century colonial narratives, while the poison woman emerged out of modernist adaptations of real cases of feminine criminality during the rise of Japanese imperialism in the late 1800s. Conceiving a plausible relation between them, however unnaturally, nevertheless produces an opportunity to understand their discursive affinities in the context of twentieth century transimperialism and geopolitics. This paper proposes this relation and, more concretely, problematizes how textual representations of the cannibal and poison woman—as tropes for Otherness and contamination—functioned as subjective technologies for constituting the illusion of the national community. After modern imperialism’s climax and formal dissolution, the figures of the cannibal and the dokufu appeared in a number of literary and cinematic works as loci for allegories of cultural resistance against and figurative recovery from the threat of neoimperial domination. Textual domestication of and consumption of the cannibal and dokufu thus created a mode for reasserting a sense of a nationalized community while repressing the remnants of their imperial origins. Paradoxically, however, the repeated regurgitations of these figures into consumable formats remain haunted by undigestible historical and discursive gaps. That is, as literary tropes implicated in the figuring of the “national body,” the cannibal and the poison woman carry with them subtextual, uncanny traces that perpetually destabilize, intoxicate and fracture the illusion of inclusivity and its dependence on discourses, bodies, of exclusion.

Author

• Andrea Mendoza, Cornell University