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Call for Chapters: Strange Tales of Latin(x) America and the Caribbean

US and European colonial/imperial discourse has long constructed Latin America and the Caribbean as spaces of excess, irrationality, monstrosity, sensuality, danger, and supernaturalism. Across travel narratives, religious writings, visual culture, literature, film, and political discourse, Indigenous, African, Caribbean, and Latinx peoples have repeatedly been rendered “strange” or “exotic” through the colonial gaze—figured as savage, alien, monstrous, magical, primitive, or undead. Yet these same imaginaries have also become powerful sites (or loci) of cultural resistance, self-fashioning, and decolonial worldmaking.

This edited collection invites contributions that examine the cultural and political work of the “strange,” the fantastic, the monstrous, and the uncanny in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx cultural production. We are particularly interested in how writers, filmmakers, artists, performers, and cultural producers reappropriate discourses of alterity to confront and unsettle the enduring legacies of colonialism, racial capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and the transatlantic slave trade.

Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives—including literary studies, cultural studies, folklore, religious studies, ethnic studies, performance studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology, and history—the collection explores how “strangeness” operates not simply as a mode of exoticization, but also as a terrain of refusal, survival, haunting, and futures otherwise.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Horror, folklore, and speculative fiction in Latin American and Caribbean contexts
• Visual cultures of the “exotic” in film, comics, gaming, tourism, and popular media
• Contemporary and historical productions of the “Other”; the “stranger” as something “painfully familiar”
• Approaching colonial discourse on “savagery” as speculative fiction – e.g., “doomed race theory,” “fantasies of auto-genocide or racial suicide,” “myth of native desolation”
• Zombies, vampires, ghosts, demons, witches, and supernatural figures as political and social allegories
• Monsters and memory in relation to dictatorship, slavery, violence, and historical trauma
• Afro-diasporic and Indigenous cosmologies, spirituality, and hauntings; reclaiming the fragmented histories of colonized subjects
• “Critical fabulation” as historiographical praxis
• Decolonial, feminist, and queer reappropriations of the monstrous
• Magical realism, surrealism, and the fantastic as (anti-)imperial aesthetics
• Themes of migration, diasporic estrangement, exile, borderlands, insularity, and post-colonial archipelagos
• Indigenous futurisms, Afro-futurisms, and speculative decolonial futures

We welcome contributions engaging literature, film, comics, the pulp era of science fiction, folklore, performance, religious practice, visual art, games, and digital culture across Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx diasporic communities in the US.

Abstracts limited to 500 words. Please include a working title and a 75-word author biography (not included in the word count). Please send submissions as a one-page Word document to Joshua R. Deckman, Stetson University, and William S. Chavez, Stetson University, by December 31, 2026, at strangetalescollection@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of January 2027. If accepted, full chapter drafts of approximately 6,000–8,000 words will be due by May 5, 2027.