Beginning with the English invasion of New England and concluding in the contemporary world of racialized mass imprisonment, Cannibal Time traces the worlds of incarceration brought by invading Europeans and forcibly imposed on those communities of people whose existence interfered with their relentless pursuit of land and resources. The early chapters track the myriad methods of exclusion and control that bolstered the settler colonial violence of invasion and conquest of Indigenous peoples and enslaved peoples of Africa. The book then follows through the centuries as new
communities of Asian Americans and Latinx found themselves the objects of such violent attentions as they, too, felt the deleterious effects of life in a highly racialized, capital-driven United States.

Cannibal Time is a bold history of indigenous carceral experiences that are also narrated comparatively to African and Asian diasporas to strengthen the impact of their stories. With a singular clarity, Hilden sorts out the impressive reach and depth of this work across four centuries, literally fleshing out analyses of colonial settler disenfranchisement, time, space,
race, and incarceration. Of importance to contemporary ethnic, American and diasporic carceral studies, the volume sensitively and respectively animates and elevates indigenous experiences.

-Lynne Horiuchi, Independent Scholar

Cannibal Time traces the true origins of the carceral state to the European invasion, settler colonialism, and its regimes of Native dispossession, genocide, and slavery.  Patricia Penn Hilden’s forceful and cogent revisionist history reveals a herrenvolk thanatocracy masquerading as a constitutional democracy, a prison house pretending to be the people’s house, and a world where the only real path to decarceration is decolonization.

-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life

Cannibal Time is a breathtaking narrative movement across carceral geographies and histories, animated by the freedom-seeking activities and insurgencies of those targeted by the New World Civilization’s ruthless technologies of capture. These pages offer a vital, unapologetic disruption and correction of both liberal multiculturalist and white nationalist redemptions of conquest, colonization, and hemispheric nation-building. Patricia Penn Hilden writes with fluidity and fluency, showing how colonialism, chattel captivity, and incarceration compose an ongoing condition of multilayered, genocidal and displacing war with vastly asymmetrical casualties across the settler nation-building project. This book calls on every reader to stake positions, declare solidarities, and undertake resistance to the legacies and still unfolding futurities of the Cannibal’s atrocities.

-Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Riverside Dept. of Black Study and Dept. of Media and Cultural Studies

Patricia Penn Hilden is Professor Emerita of Native American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published several books, the most recent From A Red Zone: Critical Perspectives on Race, Politics and Culture.