Cannibal Nihilism: Meat and Meaninglessness in the Anthropocene Imaginary

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article examines the frequent appearance of cannibalism in works of environmentally oriented speculative fiction, including Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh (2020), and Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013). Here, cannibalism is demonstrated to be more than a disturbing alimentary anxiety that lends aesthetic "shock value" to contemporary narratives of future ecological collapse and political catastrophe. Rather, the problem of people eating people serves as a proxy for a more difficult—and more conceptually nuanced—conversation about the very viability of political hope in a world defined by metastasizing environmental crises. Specifically, this article demonstrates that although works of Anthropocene fiction frequently use the specter of environmental disaster to leverage critiques of racialized capitalism, the political agenda of these novels and films is often tacitly undermined by depictions of cannibalism that frame anthropophagy as an irredeemable moral failing that cannot be explained away as the result of either neoliberal economics or the white supremacy that sustains such a system.