From Amazons to Zombies

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.

• Introduction: Making Monsters1. The Immanence of Monsters: From Iberia to the New World2. Anthropology, Anthropophagy, and Amazons3. Beautiful Deformities: The Mermaid Metaphor4. Pseudoscience and Psychobiology: The simuladores del talento5. Vampires in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction6. The Caribbean Zombie Gothic7. Epilogue: Ghosts, Globalization, and Monster MoviesBibliography

Braham’s 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.