Historians looking for accounts of anthropophagy will be disappointed by Watson's monograph. Insatiable Appetites, however, will delight readers interested in “cannibalism” as a leitmotif, unpacking binaries of “savage” and “civilization” under a gendered lens. Watson uses rumours of cannibalism to underscore imperial justifications of conquest in the North Atlantic World from 1492 to 1763. It is a work of outstanding literary analysis, deftly combining gender theory with a historical backdrop. The foundation is strong enough that irrespective of the reader background, one will be disappointed by the time they read the book's conclusion, as Watson could have extended the study much further.
Why limit this intriguing premise to the North Atlantic World and the empires of Spain, France, and Britain? Tropes of cannibalism existed across imperial worlds. Watson only anecdotally touches on Africa, which would have made for far more compelling comparative studies than what is a book too confined by her self-imposed limitation of a period bookended by Columbus’ voyage and the Seven Years War. Watson acknowledges that to focus on the discourse of “cannibalism”, certain confines were inevitable. Her sources centred on “published works”, relying primarily on translations of source materials (18–19). Here is perhaps the biggest failing of Watson's work: the silencing of indigenous voices.
Furthermore, while one cannot fault Watson for being unable to read “Greek, Portuguese, Old English, Italian, and German” (19), her sources could have been read against the grain to more fully reveal aboriginal perspectives by flipping the cannibal lens. Watson's methodology gives the appearance of only consulting English records in East Coast libraries, rather than traveling herself, like her subject matter, across the North Atlantic World. Watson is not writing a global history of cannibalism, and the trope was indeed often one-sided, yet deeper and wider research would have yielded more interesting connections and collisions, and further developed areas of the book that are lacking. For example, the Caribbean remains underdeveloped in Watson's analysis, despite the area being the origin for the words “cannibal” and “Caribbean”, both derived from the name recorded by Columbus for the “Carib” raiders attacking the Arawaks (16). She does not follow the paper trails of cannibal accounts back into the European metropoles, focusing instead on colonial impressions within the narratives of new world explores and settlers. The lack of a more world history approach is confusing, as Watson devotes a chapter to cannibalism found in Herodotus and Pliny, yet truncates her study during the fifteenth through the eighteenth century with too few source materials.
Insatiable Appetites is a brief and engaging read, comprising only 185 pages of analysis, and usefully divided chronologically across five easily digestible chapters. Anne McClintock and Ann Stoler are paid well-deserved homage as guides before Watson sets off on her study. Chapter 1 plunges deep into the past to establish the intellectual tradition of cannibalism from which Watson's sources may have attempted to create intertextuality and allusions. She shows that stories of cannibalism in the ancient world similarly placed the events as happening at the edges of their mapped understanding, which gave rise to a continued literary device in early modern, exaggerated fables of the part-human part-animal creatures in the borderlands that preyed on human flesh. Chapter 2 brings Watson's narrative to the age of Columbus, where the creatures of medieval folklore get replaced with tales of the cannibalistic Caribs, set against the feminized Arawaks, done to justify the enslavement of native peoples to build the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and shown as a threat against masculinity. Chapter 3 moves north, with Mesoamerican Indians set in the feminine and masculine divides. In this section cannibalism was a trope that underwrote the colonial exploitation of indigenous bodies, justifying the violent and sexual mistreatment at the hands of Spanish conquerors. Chapter 4 continues farther north into Canada and forward in time into the seventeenth century. Here Watson relies on the writings of Jesuits, who viewed cannibalism as part of the Iroquois’ masculine warrior tradition, creating an exulted space for salvation to Christians enduring torture. Chapter 5 centres on cannibalism under English settlement, made intriguing as sources document the English participation in cannibalism, albeit under justified circumstances such as the Jamestown colony and as a warning against of “going native” along the imperial frontier of western expansion, all while creating a space to grow the masculine virtue of strong English husbands.
Where Watson comes into her own is in her depictions of gendered ideas over the history of the body. She writes in her conclusion that “in each of the specific imperial and geographical contexts […] the discourse of cannibalism played an important part in the establishment and maintenance of imperial power, and in each case this discourse was gendered. Imperial power is always gendered” (179). Watson creates a stable platform to test her theory of gendered bodies across “temporal, geographic, imperial, and cultural circumstances” (179), highlighting that in creating the binaries of “civilization” and “savagery”, a gendered hierarchal relationship emerges of “masculinity over femininity” (179). It is a compelling claim, back up by a clever deconstruction of literary narratives. By writing about a period that predated more rigid conceptions of race, Watson is freed to focus on the gender relationships the cannibal discourse brought to a reading of bodies, highlighting ideas of sexuality which, as Watson documents, differed in Spanish, French, and English imperial mind-sets. Even with the establishment of racialized imperial encounters during the nineteenth century, Watson's reading of gendered bodies under cannibalism would be truly welcomed, as the idea of unbridled sexual lust and non-Eurocentric conceptions of gender relations did not end with the Seven Years War. Indeed, it is for this reason that Watson's book could have extended its subject matter into other periods and regions that would have strengthened the overall text, mapping changes over time and geography under a more historical, rather than literary, lens.
