Laughing in the Face of Death

Hans Staden is confounded by a Marckaya man who laughs moments before being cannibalized. This paper reads Indigenous laughter in the episode from the first part of True History: The Captivity of Hans Staden (1557) to track joy’s redefinition of confinement. While imprisonment at the hands of the Tupinambá warrants consolation in Staden’s view, the Marckaya man’s laughter suggests it merits celebration. The difference in optics lies in the way laughter audibly manifests an understanding of the staging of a food festival and the active role the consumed subject plays. Moreover, it upends Staden’s interpretation of cannibalism in favor of a material understanding of the enemy’s body as the source of food and joy. Examining transgressive laughter’s ability to unsettle a narrative about making it out of Brazil alive makes Indigenous joy central to the way the colonial outsider is written out of the festival he records.