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    Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination, the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts.
    Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation). Recurring motifs in contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China testify still further to the currency and pervasiveness of this powerful trope.
    By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.

Half a century after the Raj, India retains a major place in the British imagination. In Colonial Power, Colonial Texts, M. Keith Booker examines a number of British novels that deal with colonial rule in India in the first half of the twentieth century. The works discussed -- by authors such as Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Paul Scott, and J. G. Farrell -- date from both the colonial and postcolonial periods, and Booker pays attention as well to representations of India in both British and American popular culture, especially film. These various cultural texts open multiple viewpoints on the role of literature in the British vision of India and the role of India in the British conception of literature. Drawing particularly on the work of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, Booker focuses on the treatment of British colonial power in these fictions as that treatment indicates how colonialism and decolonization participate in a larger historical process of modernization. The author uses a Marxist model of bourgeois cultural revolution to illustrate the ways these texts engage in productive exchanges with their historical context. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts will be of particular value to those who study the role of culture in colonialism and anticolonial resistance, as well as to students and scholars of modern British literature and culture.

A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. González. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. González traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, González examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.