Enrique Chagoya's Cannibals: The 'Un-Noble' Savage in the Age of Cultural Imperialis

This thesis presents a study of the artist and printmaker Enrique Chagoya's engagement with the concept of cannibalism. The trope of the cannibal, from the moment of European contact in the Americas to the twenty-first century, has been used to denote difference and establish the boundary between the "savage" and the "civilized". The practice of human cannibalism became inexorably linked to the Americas in the Western imagination, and Chagoya's engagement with the cannibal not only exposes centers of hegemonic power, which can consume both cultures and bodies, but also works as a counter-hegemonic motif, portrayed literally as a figure devouring the bodies and culture of both Europeans and U.S. Americans. This process of cannibalization presents an alternative mode of Latin American identity construction, outside of the outdated concept of racial mixture proposed by the dominant ideology of mestizaje, allows for a decolonization of cultural identity. Chagoya's use of cannibal imagery goes beyond a metaphor for the situation of cultures and coloniality of power in Latin America and is in dialogue with a Latin American visual and linguistic tradition of looking to the indigenous past to craft a postcolonial identity. Chagoya's cannibals, and his "cannibalist" practice, challenge existing notions of Latin American alterity, reconfiguring the markers of radical difference as tools for reclaiming lost knowledges and ways of knowing.