1. Bestiaries and the Art of Cryptozoology

Many twentieth-century Latin American writers – including Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Juan José Arreola and Wilson Bueno – experimented with the form of the bestiary, adapting it to the fantastic genre or for the purposes of satire. This chapter focuses on the work of more contemporary writers and artists who draw on the themes and forms of the medieval bestiary in order to revitalize pre-Hispanic legends, to construct an alternative modernity that embraces plural ontologies, and to explore the changing relationship between humans and animals in the Anthropocene. The act of (re)imagining extinct and mythical animals takes on a particular poignancy in the context of the current rapid decline in biodiversity across the world. Indeed, as I argue throughout this chapter, the mediaeval bestiary acquires a new relevance in the context of the ecological and existential crisis that pervades the technologically developed, urbanized, globalized world. It offers alternative ways of thinking and imagining the world that have been excised from the modern, rationalist, Western standpoint, challenging ideas about human exceptionalism and promoting a view of the universe as intimately interconnected within relationships of reciprocity. At the hands of contemporary writers and artists such as Rafael Toriz and Edgar Cano (Mexico), Claudio Romo (Chile) and Walmor Corrêa (Brazil), Latin American bestiaries of the twenty-first century contest dominant images of a depleted, exhausted, fragile natural world, responding to the need to re-enchant nature in the face of its rationalization and commodification in Western modernity, to revalorize indigenous and popular approaches, and to reconnect animals with human social, cultural, and spiritual lives.