Paquette, Nadège (2024) From Cans to Kins: Eating as Becoming-With and Relational Cannibalism in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done for food?” Cordova girl Myra asks protagonist Kora in Larissa Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu. Myra’s question does not simply demand an answer at the individual level within a fictional narrative, but needs to be extended to actual food systems. What is it that we do in order to consume beings as food? The novel’s fictional food systems reflect the nonfictional ones where the forms of life humans eat and call food are often understood as product rather than beings with whom we are in relation. Such treatment is based on the assumption that the human body is a system with fixed boundaries separating it from other species, and that reason makes humans an exceptional species. Against these beliefs, I argue that those made into food can be understood as kin rather than product. I read this relational ontological mode throughout Lai’s novel where food circulation, ingestion, and zoonosis indicate a range of ways bodies infiltrate one another despite rigid policing. I examine practices of food preservation and social control in The Tiger Flu as forms of containment that separate human subjects from commodified, racialized, and dehumanized others. Containment is challenged by characters’ becoming-with those they eat and those with whom they share meals. When the first category bleeds into the second, consumption becomes cannibalism. I show that the novel not only denounces capitalist relations for which cannibalistic eating is a model but also proposes the alternative paradigm of relational cannibalism where eating is an act of trans-corporeal integration maintaining kinship beyond death.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > English |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Paquette, Nadège |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | English |
| Date: | 28 August 2024 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Arseneault, Jesse |
| Keywords: | Posthumanism, food, Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu, cannibalism, eating, relational ontology |
| ID Code: | 994422 |
| Deposited By: | Nadège Paquette |
| Deposited On: | 24 Oct 2024 17:17 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Oct 2024 17:17 |
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