From cosmic cannibalism to colonial (re)figurations of the mouth-machine in the film The cannibal club

Abstract

Based on the representation of black people in contemporary horror films, the article reflects on the symbolic construction of narrative devices about the biological allegorical mechanism of colonial hunger, through the lens of raciality. The concept of cosmic cannibalism and mouth-machine make it possible to understand the violent and figurative act of eating based on a film analysis of the film The Cannibal Club (2019). The decomposition of the work's narrative articulation of horror enables the exploration of the symbolic structures associated with extractive colonial violence represented by the parable of the act of devouring, cannibalizing and tearing submissive black bodies into pieces in an archetypal conjuration of the colonial geology of hunger. The application of film analysis establishes understandings about which bodies are edible in a society with structural eating disorders. Cannibalism emerges as a relational key with the spectator by tensioning the act of eating with the sense of exploring and devouring, based on the hierarchies of race and class that demarcate power relations in a colonial-global food chain. Vulnerable food as part of a game of extractive supremacy.