Abstract
In the introduction, Eljaiek-Rodríguez delineates the idea of American monstrosity as conceived in the Conquest and the Colonia and its relationship with the concept of the Antipodes. This definition grounds an analysis of how Latin American writers and intellectuals have transformed the monstrous, appropriating it and engaging it as a political tool. Eljaiek-Rodríguez defines additional concepts such as migration, cannibalism, and heterogeneity that are essential to the analysis of the films presented in the book.
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Notes
- 1.
For scholar Paolo Vignolo , “the central stone of the dominant worldview in the fifteenth century is still the theory of the zones of the ancients, whose essential result has to do with the existence of lands—and perhaps peoples—at the antipodes , [areas of the globe] by definition impossible to reach because of impassable natural barriers, stormy seas, and torrid deserts. The real novelty of Columbus’s voyage is not to have discovered an island in the ocean, but to have broken—following the course of the Portuguese—the natural obstacles that prevented the passage to the other hemisphere, where the mysterious people of the antipodes dwell” (158, my translation).
- 2.
As stated by Yobeng Chicangana Bayona, “the image of Amerindian cannibalism would be disseminated in Europe with more intensity from the story of Hans Staden, a German explorer who was captured by the Tupinambá in the mid-sixteenth century. His incredible experience as a prisoner of a group of cannibals was described in stories that would win several editions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that is, the theme of cannibalism had enormous survival over time” (xiv).
- 3.
Carlos Jáuregui’s Canibalia is one of the most comprehensive studies on the formation and evolution of the idea of cannibalism and its transformation inside and outside Latin America.
- 4.
According to Fernández Retamar , Michel de Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” was the one of the sources used by Shakespeare for the Caliban character. “Giovanni Floro’s English translation of the Essays [by Montaigne ] was published in 1603. Not only was Floro a personal friend of Shakespeare , but the copy of the translation that Shakespeare owned and annotated is still extant. This piece of information [probes] that the Essays was one of the direct sources of Shakespeare’s last great work, The Tempest (1612)” (8).
- 5.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari define becoming as a process of change, a movement within a system. It is a relationship of contiguity, of contact with something different than “me.” It relates to the idea of learning, but a learning that allows a deeper connection with the Other.
- 6.
Nelson adds a “k” to the word gothic to “distinguish it from the medieval cultural period its first practitioners drew inspiration from” (2).
- 7.
The assertion of the existence of a Latin American variety of the gothic genre—and its particularity in relation to subgenres like the Caribbean gothic—is supported by the research of several Latin American scholars, such as Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Ilse Bussing, Nadina Olmedo , Inés Ordiz, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, Persephone Braham , and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos. Their research is mainly focused on the development of the genre in the continent since the nineteenth century.
- 8.
Argentinian anthropologist Néstor García Canclini defines hybridization as a phenomenon where diverse systems of meaning intersect and connect, creating new meanings. For him the process of “hybridity has a long trajectory in Latin American cultures. We remember formerly the syncretic forms created by Spanish and Portuguese matrices mixing with indigenous representation. In the projects of independence and national development we saw the struggle to make cultural modernism compatible with economic semimodernization, and both compatible with the persistent traditions” (241–242).
Uruguayan writer and essayist Ángel Rama adapts the term transculturation from the writings of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, transforming it into an analytical term of the Latin American cultures and their interactions with dominant cultures. Rama defines transculturation as the way in which the effects of a modern culture are measured according to the interaction between the original culture (a Latin American culture) and modern culture, mainly European.
- 9.
Arnold highlights the fact that “over the years 1990–2010 a huge movement of people occurred worldwide. Some were refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced people fleeing wars or other disasters, but the majority were economic migrants seeking a better life in countries other than their own. Some hoped to settle permanently in a new country; others saw themselves as temporary migrants, trying to earn more than they could in their home country” (255). The second decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a migrant crisis that affected the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean region. This situation aggravated with the Syrian Civil War, in which, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 5.5 million people have fled the country since 2012, becoming refugees (mostly) in neighboring countries.
- 10.
Although it was never formulated as a continuous trilogy (or tetralogy, if Veneno para las hadas [Poison for the Fairies, 1984] is included) the four films usually get grouped because of stylistic and thematic considerations.
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Filmography
Carne de tu carne. Dir. Carlos Mayolo. Compañía de Fomento Cinematográfico Focine, 1983.
Pura Sangre. Dir. Luis Ospina. Compañía de Fomento Cinematográfico Focine, 1982.
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Eljaiek-Rodríguez, G. (2018). Introduction: Antipodean Horrors—The Return of Latin American Monsters. In: The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97250-3_1
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