A ‘horrid way of feeding’

Cannibalism both fascinates and repels. The concept of the cannibal has changed and evolved, from the semi- or in-human anthropophagi of Classical texts to the ‘savage’ cannibals of colonial times, whose alleged aberrations served as a justification for invasion, conversion and extermination, to the contemporary cannibal driven often by psychosexual drives. Cannibal texts typically present the act as pervasive, aggressive and repulsive. If these parameters are admitted, alleged cannibals immediately fall outside normative European humanist morality. This paper examines cannibalism as a major delineator of the civilised human. Cannibals offer social scientists a handy milestone to confirm the constant improvement and progress of humanity. The idea that colonised peoples were not savage, degenerate cannibals threatens the concept of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which was assumed to show an inexorable progress from plants to animals to humans, and upward toward the divine, led by enlightened Western civilisation. But cannibal mythology, factual or imaginary, offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the assumptions of human supremacism and see ourselves as edible, natural beings.

Sense of Things

Chapter 2 is a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s 1999 Locus Award–winning near-future novel Brown Girl in the Ring. Becoming Human avers that gendered antiblack metaphysics continues to subtend scales of world among humans, animals, and objects in Martin Heidegger’s still highly influential thought, despite being imagined as a corrective to previous scales, such as the scalae nauturae or the Great Chain of Being examined in chapter 1. It explores what other sense of world becomes available in spaces of abjection and the unthought. This chapter also argues that the absent presence of the black female figure functions as an interposition that subtends and therefore paradoxically holds the potential to topple the logic of this schema and investigates how, as a consequence of this system’s imperialist worldmaking and monopolization of sense, the matter of the black female body is vertiginously affected. An inquiry into onto-epistemology, this chapter explores the reciprocal production of aesthesis and empiricism, both the seemingly scientific and the perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise under conditions of imperial Western humanism.

Historical process and historical time in Tom Stoppard’s drama

The article analyzes Tom Stoppard’s historical concept through philological, philosophical and cultural discourse. The article highlights the transformation of the playwright’s views on the historical process: from following the concept of postmodernism to consideration of historical process as included in the Great Chain of Being and objectification of historical events in accordance to Hegel’s determinism. The article covers the influence of Wilson’s and Berlin’s school of history of the ideas on the formation of Stoppard’s history concept. The article highlights the main issues addressed by Stoppard: individual freedom and protection of the human rights; it is noted that the moral and civic pathos of the plays is a distinctive feature of Stoppard’s drama.