Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.
By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.
- Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters by Surekha Davies. Cambridge University Press, 31 Aug 2017. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
- Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies. University of California Press, 4 Feb 2025. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.