Antropofagia, Calibanism, and the Post-Romero Zombie: Cannibal Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean

Authors

David S. Dalton, University of North Carolina at CharlotteFollow

Content Language

EN

Abstract

This study uses zombie theory to flesh out common themes between Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán. While both of these canonical Latin Americanist thinkers theorized literary and cultural cannibalism as a resistant act that could challenge the hegemony of Western cosmologies and aesthetics, very little scholarship has thought to reconcile—or even juxtapose—these men’s thought. The article asserts a shared camaraderie between Latin American people of color and the zombie’s of the region’s cultural production by emphasizing both entities’ association (fair or not) with cannibalism in the Western imaginary. When viewed through this framework, even the zombie apocalypse comes to signify an optimistic revolt of the oppressed against corrupt, imperial entities. The article references numerous cases of Latin American literary and cultural production both to highlight the discursive ties between the Latin Americanist zombie and people of African and indigenous descent and to signal strategies that these works propose for challenging Western (white) supremacy in the region.

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/2167-6577.6.1.6

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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06

Recommended Citation

Dalton, David S. (2018) "Antropofagia, Calibanism, and the Post-Romero Zombie: Cannibal Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean," Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 6.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/2167-6577.6.1.6
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/alambique/vol6/iss1/6