CRIP EXHUMATIONS (FROM THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE). HUMAN ZOOS IN TWO RECENT LATIN AMERICAN NOVELS

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the ways in which Carlos Gamerro's La jaula de los ona and Gabriela Wiener's Huaco retrato have engaged decolonially with the critical exhumation of the captivity endured by Fuegians and Peruvian Indigenous peoples during the establishment of acclimatization gardens and human zoos in the nineteenth century, as well as with the colonial continuities of this episode in Latin America. Drawing on the intersection between disability studies and decolonial thought, we problematize how, through a literary imagination that is at once decolonial and political, alternative registers of Indigenous captivity are articulated, and the relationships between racism, epistemology, and disability are made visible, with the aim of rereading and reinterpreting the figures of racialized, feminized, weakened, and/or monstrified bodies within the colonial and racist archive.