This nearly eight-foot accordion-folded artist’s book mimics the codices produced in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest. (Most were destroyed by the Spanish, while others, like the famous Codex Borgia, were taken to Europe.) Like these manuscripts, Enrique Chagoya’s book is made from amate, a traditional fig bark paper, and is read from right to left. El Regreso del Canibal Macrobiótico introduces Chagoya’s “utopian cannibal” (wearing a head from the Codex Borgia and a grey coat), a trickster in a parallel universe who ingests European and U.S. culture and incorporates it into that of an uncolonized Mesoamerica. The result is a non-linear clash of appropriated signifiers ranging from pre-Columbian mythology to Catholic iconography, and from 20th century American pop culture and politics to European fantasies of the “New World.” In this way, Chagoya uses appropriation as intervention. He calls this method “reverse anthropology,” critiquing dominant narratives by subverting the conventions established by colonial and imperial cultures.