To pure devour represents a continuous and subversive assimilation of one other into your own ground. It is the recontextualization of imposing and colonizing technologies, geographies, pedagogies, and procedures to reaffirm the colonized reality as the center of your own world. It is the constant inversion of the taboo into totem through the digestion of multiple and universal imposing referential into a local basis. It identifies homogeneity as the least nutritious substrate, and the eating, the assimilation, the most vital procedure for resilience and resistance: digestion as the starting point. Like an antropófago , “it only interests me what is not mine.”

If eating another as a resistance act is an ancient idea - tracing back to indigenous cosmologies since long before America’s invasion and, more recently, to the Manifesto Antropofago - in this issue, we wonder how to recontextualize this practice of universal appropriations? In a moment when borders are monumentally closed and where difference is marginalized in a forever renewal of nationalist myths; we must ask continuously: what is our role in countering the endurance of efforts to efface otherness? How can we, from a place like the one we find ourselves today, demonstrate such an empathic appetite? How to embrace and beware of the limits and contradictions we might find in this search? Ambiguously committed and sarcastic - for sarcasm is one of the most powerful tools for subversion - this issue suggests a reflection about devouring as a tool for constant transformation.

Paprika’s Pure Devouring Issue is an invitation for dinner. Dilara Karademir plans the dinner and talks about oversized tables; K. David Jackson shows how this massive table can cross the Atlantic, distributing the guest’s seats by questioning: who eats who? Andrew Economos Miller discusses what happens when you decide to eat yourself; Helena Ramos talks about ways of (un)dressing for an anthropophagic dinner while Jack Parham, our Han Staden , teaches how to keep your clothes on; Isabel Sanchez eats with her eyes; Devi Nayar redeems recipes long looted, and Gabriel Biselli talks about bad digestion and postmodern spices.