What is Eating an Empire : The Body That Fears Itself: Contagion and Cannibalism as Civilisational Anxiety in British and American Colonial Literature

This presentation argues that British and American colonial literature imagines the colonised "other" through two recurring bodily metaphors: contagion and cannibalism. Rather than treating them separately, it reads them as one civilisational anxiety, the fear of incorporation. Disease figures the colony as a threat entering the empire's body, while cannibalism figures the empire's own extractive appetite returning to consume it. Through a comparative reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Melville's Benito Cereno, and drawing on Foucault's biopolitics, it shows how the coloniser's fear of contamination mirrors its unspoken guilt about consuming the colonised through trade, labour and enslavement.