How Columbus Invented Cannibals

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How did Christopher Columbus invent the idea of “Cannibals?” While evidence of people who eat other people existed long before Columbus, the idea of tribes of “savages” in the jungle who hunt other people for food was truly birthed with Columbus. He is even the first person to ever use the word “Cannibal” to describe such people. The problem is, no such people really existed in the Caribbean islands where Columbus landed. But the myth of the savage Cannibal took on a life of its own and became a common way to excuse colonization and slavery. How did it happen? Watch the episode to find out!!!

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Written and Hosted By: Danielle Bainbridge
Graphics By: Noelle Smith
Directed By: Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com)

Works Cited
Casid, Jill H. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005
De Andrade, Oswald, and Leslie Bary. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (Jul-Dec 1991): 38-47.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.
SCHUTT, BILL. CANNIBALISM: A Perfectly Natural History. S.l.: ALGONQUIN OF CHAPEL HILL, 2017
Sinclair, Safiya. Cannibal. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Springfield, Consuelo Lopez, ed. Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York UP, 2012.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014.
Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Ed. Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130501-jamestown-cannibalism-archeology-science/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0410_030410_cannibal.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061205-cannibals.htmlhttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/cannibalism-common-natural-history-bill-schutt/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/human-cannibalism-nutrition-archaeology-science/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100831-cannibalism-cannibal-cavemen-human-meat-science/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/sleeping-with-cannibals-128958913/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/cannibalism-human-behaviour
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4076244/Distressing-photos-1920s-Russian-famine-turned-hopeless-peasants-cannibals-five-million-people-starved-death.html
lhttp://hartzog.org/j/cannibals.html
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/history-re-written-christopher-columbus-and-the-cannibals/
https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/events/8-myths-and-atrocities-about-christopher-columbus-and-columbus-day/

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