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Braham, Persephone. From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. 203 pp. Hardback. ISBN 978-161148-706-0. $85.00.
From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America is a text that struggles to overcome basic difficulties from the start. It is nearly impossible to summarize all of Latin America in a single text, let alone all of its monsters with no country or time period distinctions to make it manageable. However, as a text within monster studies, Persephone Braham has come at monsters from some interesting angles, and in ways that might prove useful to other researchers. There was a considerable amount of research put into this book and it is evident on nearly every page; unfortunately, it also comes with problems it struggles to overcome.
The book is divided into six chapters with introduction and epilogue. The introduction presents as much of a unified thesis as is found anywhere in the book. It briefly explains the importance of monsters to Latin America, how they developed, and how they have been used. It also gives a thorough introduction to monster theory and monsters in and of themselves. This chapter is one of the most focused-and might be of interest to someone setting out in monster studies. Chapter one then continues with a considerable amount of background material, focusing largely on Spain and the monsters Spaniards "encountered" or thought they would encounter in Latin America. The following five chapters are named according to various themes or monsters, though these can be loosely interpreted at times. Chapter two's title is "Anthropology, Anthropophagy, and Amazons" and does speak about Amazons and also a fair bit about cannibals. The chapter draws together Amazons and cannibals as some of the ways the "new world" was feminized, and demarcated as deviant.
The mermaid, again loosely interpreted, is brought up next in chapter three, which examines the (mostly) female monster found in hybrid forms like the mermaid. It compares the seductive nature and moral ambiguity of these types of monsters to Spanish feelings about Latin America as an amalgamation of various...