“When Humans are On the Menu: Cannibalism and Modernity”

BAMS/MSA 2026

Loughborough, UK, 1-4 July 2026

I’m seeking abstracts for papers exploring representations of cannibalism in global modernist literature and culture for BAMS/MSA 2026. I’m planning this as an entirely virtual panel, but I am open to an in-person panel if that is everyone’s preference!

The intersection between modernism and food studies is having a significant critical moment. For instance, Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture (2019), surveys modernists’ use of gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as well as the period’s social and cultural concerns: modern technology, the consequences of empire, war and violence, to name a few. I’d like this panel to push “gastronomy” even further and take us into the realm of taboo: cannibalism.

A (nearly) ubiquitously forbidden act across modern civilizations, consuming the flesh of one’s own species conjures reactions ranging anywhere from physical revulsion to moral horror. However, “taboo” in this case does not indicate a rarity. Cannibalism was, comparatively speaking, a common practice and it exists across human temporality and civilization, up to and including the 21st century. Evidence of human-on-human consumption extends as far back as the earliest Homo sapiens, found in Ethiopia, the bones of whom indicate “de-fleshing” by other humans.

Though literary and artistic references to human-on-human consumption are certainly not unique to modernism, there is nevertheless a fascination with the subject. Look no further than the Brazilian Anthropophagic Movement and selected works by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and others.

With this context in mind, this panel asks, what are the literary, philosophical, artistic, political, etc. stakes when humans are—metaphorically or literally—on the menu?

Topics may include:

• Cannibalism as a discursive practice
• Global modernism, the rise of modern anthropology, and the cannibalistic “other” 
• Relationships between the consumers and the consumed—to interrogate a culture shifting its focus, as Jeff Wallace notes, from “production to consumption.” [1]
• Cannibalism and religion/spirituality
• As a metaphor for cultural absorption and transformation
• Interdisciplinary approaches to the topic are welcome!

Please send 250-word abstracts to Elysia Balavage (elysia.balavage@sru.edu) by 17 December 2025.

[1] Jeff Wallace, Beginning Modernism, 98.