From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America [Hardcover]

How did it happen that whole regions of Latin AmericaAmazonia, Patagonia, the Caribbeanare named for monstrous races of women warriors, big-footed giants and cannibals? Through history, monsters inhabit human imaginings of discovery and creation, and also degeneration, chaos, and death. Latin Americas most dynamic monsters can be traced to archetypes that are found in virtually all of the world's sacred traditions, but only in Latin America did Amazons, cannibals, zombies, and other monsters become enduring symbols of regional history, character, and identity. From Amazons to Zombies presents a comprehensive account of the qualities of monstrosity, the ways in which monsters function within and among cultures, and theories and genres of the monstrous. It describes the genesis and evolution of monsters in the construction and representation of Latin America from the Ancient world and early modern Iberia to the present.Persephone Braham is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico (2004), and she has edited an interdisciplinary volume, African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States (2014). She has written extensively on monsters and the monstrous in the Hispanic world.Brahams study is refreshing for an Anglophone audience fed on stories and images dictated by a relatively narrow canon. The variety of inhuman entities which people its pages and its historical survey of several centuries of Latin American writings and film sketches a diversity and flexibility to monsters, intimating a range of unperceived strangenesses shadowing diverse colonial encounters. Folklore

Introduction: Making Monsters
1. The Immanence of Monsters: From Iberia to the New World
2. Anthropology, Anthropophagy, and Amazons
3. Beautiful Deformities: The Mermaid Metaphor
4. Pl“Y