The term cannibal was born linked to the conquest of America, the cultural confrontation, the imperial war and plunder. For centuries, Europe used it as an instrument of legitimization of imperialism and colonialism. However, during the last decades of the last century, with global tourism and the devaluation of the exotic, we witnessed the displacement of the figure of the cannibal from the edges of our world to the center, from our outer space to our inner space.
The myth survives strongly, but now it is explicitly revealed as a story that no longer speaks about them, but about us. This shift is evident both in art and media culture and in the academic field, where the cannibal has become a basic category for social sciences from postcolonial, racial or gender perspectives. It is no longer an excess attributable to others, but to us as voracious consumers and to our cultural imagination that invents it as a ghost. This book addresses the disturbing and sinister figure of the wild devourer, that stranger who lives among us, from a transdisciplinary perspective located between the history and theory of art, anthropology, criticism and cultural history, with examples taken from the literary field, the art, cinema, architecture, urban planning, media culture and political activism.
