On the Origins of Colonial Monsters and Decolonial Beasts

The coloniality of power uses race as its axis to legitimize relations of domination, which culminated in the invention of the category of color, dividing the world into white and non-white men (Quijano 2002: 777–9). This division created an absolute otherness beyond race that had social, religious, and intellectual consequences. The white man, in his role as the classifier, established himself as superior, thus as human, thereby destabilizing the concept of humanity and assimilating the Other to nature, savagery, lack of reason, feelings, and even the ability to suffer. In short, the Other was stripped of its humanity and assimilated with animals. The white man, the purported possessor of humanity, then emerged as the natural leader of the herd, since the dominant species “is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, ‘the others’” (Fanon 2004: 41).

The animalization of the Other brought about the coloniality of knowledge, which refers to the epistemic upheaval of the domination process that, having taken social, political, cultural, and economic control, established the myth of colonial epistemic superiority. In other words, the coloniality of knowledge refers to the devaluing attitude that the colonizer had (and continues having) toward knowledge produced outside their own, which determines the processes of center-periphery relations, as well as ethnic and racial hierarchies (Fanon 2004: 20). Evidently, epistemic control emptied colonized peoples of their knowledge under arguments of irrationality, fantasy, subjectivity, and regionalism. By stripping the colonized of their knowledge and humanity, the coloniality of being was established (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 130), being a concept strongly linked to the valuation of bodies because it stems from the experience of ontological animalization lived by certain bodies in the modern world-system. The Other loses its human status and becomes a body without mind or soul, an exploitable and disposable body, a body devoid of humanity. The colonial fiction centered around the ontological reduction of the Other unleashed terror on racialized bodies by establishing colonial difference (Mignolo 2002: 61). This term refers to the absolute Otherness that coloniality imposed on bodies, sacrificing them to a discourse that undermines their humanity and confines them to animalization, marginalization, exploitation, and silence. The Other was bestialized by being determined as a racialized body. Here, bestialization is understood as the mechanism of understanding Otherness within modern rhetoric and taxonomy.

To speak of the beast is to refer to a wild and dangerous animal, untamed, often represented as ferocious or fearsome, associated with primitive or instinctive qualities. Under these criteria, I work with the concept of the beast under two optics: the bestialized and the bestializer. The former refers to the colonized being, the animal, perceived as the threatening and barely domesticated background of the fragile civilized white bodies, the constitutive flaw (cultural, racial, historical) that crossed and demarcated the limits of humanity (Giorgi 2014: 11). The bestialized subject is constructed as the Other, reduced to an animalized, useful, and exploitable body. In addition to bestializing racialized bodies, the colonial gaze confers upon them the status of monsters, “disturbing hybrids” (Cohen 1996: 6) straddling the realms of cultural, racial, and sexual difference. The gaze that turns people into a beast and then into a monster is conjured by the colonizing justification for the establishment and expansion of a reign of terror, subjugation, genocide, and domination admitted by a politics of bodies that decides on the Other, the beast. Next, there is the bestializer. Revisiting Césaire’s words for this chapter’s epigraph, we must ask: how does the colonizer become a beast? The explanation lies in the concept of the “beast within” developed by Western political philosophy, which, according to Mary Midgley, was defined to explain the problem of evil “as a scapegoat for human wickedness” (1980: 40). Thus, the paradoxical ferocity and indomitable ambition of the modern conquiro ego had an explanation intertwined with the human condition. The bestializer, the colonizer, differs from the bestialized, the colonized, in that his bestiality is characterized by a sense of superiority, ultraviolence, and evil, while that of the colonized is associated with servitude but with the latent potential for rebellion and violence. This metaphor is common to modern rationality.

In Our Share of Night, the beast opens the door to the monster due to the fantastic nature of fiction. Traditionally, the monster has been conceptualized in relation to the supernatural, mythical, or magical, as well as heinous criminals, witches, or grotesque hybrids that fuse physical qualities of humans and beasts (Gilmore 2003: 6–8). The monster is a “horrific being [that] may also be threatening psychologically, morally, or socially. It may destroy one’s identity … seek to destroy the moral order … or advance an alternative society” (Carroll 1990: 42–3). Both beasts and monsters are frequently employed as symbols of various themes, including power, fear, danger, and the unknown.

Although the colonial process began in the sixteenth century, the colonial pattern of power did not end with the Latin American independence movements of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the eradication of coloniality seems, and likely will continue to be, elusive. We face the enduring effects of colonialism in epistemic, political, economic, subjective, and aesthetic spheres. According to Mignolo, Latin America faces, in addition to new forms of external colonialism, an internal colonialism,1 Colonialism operated internally but also externally through new economic and political strategies. It’s no coincidence that in the 1970s, Southern Cone countries were under military dictatorships, while U.S. economic interests drove an interventionist policy of either supporting or opposing these regimes. Although Argentina acted with some autonomy in pursuing policies that went against U.S. imperialist interests, the power imbalance between the two countries created a colonial experience during the Argentine dictatorship. As Morgenfeld (2014) points out, international powers intervene from a privileged position that secures their supremacy. For a more comprehensive review of external influences on military strategies and economic policies in Latin America and Argentina during the Cold War, see Echeverría (2020), Galván and Osuna (2024), Morgenfeld (2014), Rabe (2012), Serrano (2010), and Tapia Valdez (1980). which he describes as “a re-articulation of the coloniality of power [where] the elites of the [postcolonial countries] … have to be subservient to the first [world]” (López-Calvo 2016: 173). Internal colonialism is the process of dehumanization and violence within the peripheral country, turning its own population into beasts, as result of the assimilation and reproduction of the oppressor’s culture. This colonialism shapes a subjectivity based on individual and corporate success, fostering an economy that prioritizes profit over individuals. It is also expressed in the national cycle related to historical processes of colonial domination that permeate the contemporary spheres of modes of production, state political systems, and ideologies anchored in cultural homogeneity (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010: 36). Viewed through the lens of colonialism, the last Argentine dictatorship emerges as a period of internal colonialism. During this time, economic, political, military, and social models imposed, either directly or indirectly, by the United States and France were adopted and reproduced, notably through the National Security Doctrine, Plan Condor, and the anti-communist struggle.