"It’s some cannibal thing": Canada and Brazil in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Abstract

Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s artistic and philosophical manifesto of Brazilian cannibalism best enables readers to grasp Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s trilogy MaddAddam, in terms of its treatment of settler and Indigenous relationality in its satirical posthuman world. MaddAddam is a work of speculative fiction that satirically predicts possible outcomes of early 21st century neoliberalism. A survival tale, the trilogy articulates its angle of vision through motifs of literal and figurative cannibalism, highlighting settler and Indigenous relationality in the Americas. While situated in Canadian literary traditions, the work engages Brazilian anthropophagic (cannibalist) strategies to craft an ending that is ambivalent about settler futures.