States of Savagery argues that, more than just the consumption of individual bodies, cannibalism figures the political struggle to define the boundaries between self and other, as well as the dangers inherent in this struggle--the possible eradication of the personal and social body. Cannibalism thus registers the interrelationship of political incorporation and state violence. It marks the ways in which political entities are envisioned as body politics that consume and expel, that violently rend individuals in the making of "The People." Through analyses of John Hawkes's The Cannibal, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, this dissertation elucidates the nexus of political organicism, biopolitics, and state violence. It explicates how these novels utilize the cannibal trope to clarify the relationship between the "life" of the political body and the slaughter and consumption of "disposable" peoples. Cannibalism registers the unavoidable swing between biopolitical principles and necropolitical violence. It illuminates how the concept of the nation as a biological body entrusted with protecting its citizens' bare life inevitably leads to the notion that the political body must consume in order to survive and to metonymically feed its citizens. While political organicism sanctions sacrifice and naturalizes the political aggregate's consumption, the trope of cannibalism acts to denaturalize this violence and detrivialize the death of the other.
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