The “Domestic Mysteries” of the Cannibal: Indigenous Women’s Agency in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil

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This article studies the representations of cannibalism in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil. It argues that Southey used cannibal narratives to comment on sexual interracial relations in Brazil, as well as to address the role of indigenous women in the Empire. The first section of the article focuses on Southey’s representation of cannibal women, and its relationship with European accounts of witches, suggesting female cannibalism revealed Southey’s anxieties about old indigenous women’s sexuality and agency. The second section connects this with discourses of mestizaje in Latin America. Mestizaje was the term used to describe the long historical process of racial intermarriage in the region, particularly between white men and indigenous women. The notion of mestizaje was often used to suggest the progressive homogenizing and “whitening” of the Latin American population. I argue that cannibalism represents the underside of the mestizaje narrative, suggesting a chaotic and publicly violent process of racial integration that disrupts the sanitized narrative of mestizaje as a peaceful and stabilizing process of Europeanization.