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Chapter 1 - Fear

Junot Díaz’s Zombies and Les contorsions extraordinaires in “Monstro”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Sarah M. Quesada
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

This chapter traces the history of the zombie back to its Vodun cradle of Dahomey (the Republic of Benin) in Díaz’s sci-fi eco-parable “Monstro” (New Yorker 2012). A story about an epidemic that spreads on the Haitian-Dominican borderland and gives birth to a racialized zombie, I read the discourse of difference in Díaz’s story through the lens of the African archive. The French 1763 Relation du Royaume de Judas en Guinée, (in les Archives Nationales d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence, France) and oral proverbs preserved at memorial sites in Ouidah, Benin recovered during fieldwork shed light on the ways the zombie became distorted, in Africa, before becoming a symbol of fear in the American imaginary. Ultimately, I argue that if the zombie became distorted when written into the colonial archive, reading Díaz’s story alongside African archival epistemologies—both oral and written—rewrites a Latin-African history. By revisiting African archives about Vodun, along with White colonial fears of slave rebellion in the Americas and neoliberal labor exploitation, I show how Díaz’s story mimics the archival discourse about Vodun and its practice to redraw a Latinx-African axis and unsettle the common conception of the zombie to deroot its eurocentric signification.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Fear
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.002
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  • Fear
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fear
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.002
Available formats
×