Caribbean Apocalypse: Imagining the End of the Modern/Colonial World in Junot Diaz’s “Monstro”

• In Event: Coloniality, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Caribbean: Contributions, Productive Intersections and Challenges

Abstract

Whereas postcolonial theory began as a response to the end of British colonialism and is in genealogical succession to both post-structuralism and postmodernism, “decolonial thinking and doing emerged and unfolded, from the sixteenth century on, as responses to the oppressive and imperial bent of modern European ideals projected to and enacted in, the non-European world” (Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Modernity). This longer view of history widens our scope of inquiry, allowing us to consider the impact of the epistemic rupture enacted by the European encounter in the Americas on our current relationship to knowledge, and encouraging a return to embodied narratives that have been rendered suspect by Eurocentrism and post-structuralism alike. Narratives of bodily disruption explored through a decolonial lens, I argue, offer particularly rich terrain for considering questions of identity and subjectivity and allow us access to devalued or otherwise invisible knowledge.
In his 2012 post-apocalyptic science fiction story “Monstro,” Dominican-American author Junot Díaz provocatively engages the trope of blackness as disease by suggesting that the embodied experiences of the world’s most marginalized subjects can both threaten the destruction of the globe and help to bring about its rebirth. Set on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the story follows a mysterious infection spreading in Haiti called “La Negrura”—the Blackness—which transforms the afflicted into forty-foot tall cannibal zombies. In Díaz’s own words, Hispaniola is “the eschaton that divided the Old World from the New.” Therefore, as both the first point of contact between Europe and the Americas in 1492 and home to the first black republic in 1804, Hispaniola offers an ideal backdrop for dramatizing the effects of coloniality and the legacy of transatlantic slavery in a not-too-distant future. By performing a close reading of “Monstro” mediated by Frantz Fanon, I highlight the significance of Díaz’s choice of setting and genre and argue that by urging readers to link the end of the modern/colonial world with its origins, Díaz offers an exciting case study that illuminates the value of a decolonial perspective.

Author

• Carolyn Urena