ABSTRACT
How did it happen that whole regions of Latin America-Amazonia, Patagonia, the Caribbean-are named for the monstrous races of women warriors, big-footed giants, and consumers of human flesh? Across time and across cultures, monsters appear in origin myths and prophecies of decline and fall, populating human imaginings of resurrection and renovation, fecundity and transformation, decline and death. But it is most particularly in Latin America, whose discovery coincided with the birth of modernity, that Amazons, cannibals, sirens and other monsters have become enduring symbols of national and regional character. Embodying exoticism, hybridity, and excess, monsters sustained the ongoing conceptualization of the unknown that was a prerequisite to conquest and colonization; after independence, monsters became metaphors for a series of problems ranging from indigenous and African slavery to dictatorship and postcolonial identity. The Caribbean Caliban, the anthropophagous Amazonian landscape, Haiti’s living dead, and the sirens of the seas loom in Latin America’s identity literature as incarnations of imminence, desire, and dread. This study seeks to expose symbolic rationales of Latin America’s discourse of self-discovery, beginning with the portentous encounters of 1492, in the Sea of Cannibals.
