Colonial encounters projected monsters onto new territories rather than dispelling them

Evidence

The end of the Middle Ages, rather than resulting in a reduction in monsters, opened the door to all kinds of “scientific” studies of miraculous creatures living on newly discovered islands and continents. Fantasies about giants, Amazons, and others were fairly common, and while these subjects will be examined more fully in the subsequent chapters, it is important to say something here about the new opportunities for monster-making. When Europeans encountered these new territories, their imaginations went into overdrive; thus during the Age of Exploration numerous monsters were purportedly observed in the Americas, the South Pacific, and other colonial spaces. This began with the sighting of islands in the Americas and the South Pacific, places that inspired a sense of mystery and wonder. For the European, “the unknown island is conceived as a self-contained possible world for the colonial imagination, a place where anything unexpected can happen.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 236

Categorization

• QUESTION: The author gestures forward to later chapters on giants and Amazons — worth chasing how the Muslim monster figure and the New World monster were or were not kept distinct.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing inquiry into how monsters map to Western anxieties — new-world monsters here seem to be containers for colonial wonder rather than religious fear.