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

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 heg...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAlambique (Tampa) Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 1 - 20
Main Author Dalton, David
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published University of South Florida 01.12.2018
Subjects
antropofagia
caliban
Junot Díaz
Max Brooks
Pedro Valencia
post-Romero zombie
postcolonialism
zombie
zombie theory
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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.
ISSN:2167-6577
2167-6577
DOI:10.5038/2167-6577.6.1.6