Decolonizing the Undead

ii
 Decolonizing the Undead
Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature,
Film, and Media

Edited by
Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas, and
Stephen Shapiro
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie Roxanne Douglas and

Giulia Champion 1

Part One Thinking Zombies

1 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .”: Dessalines, Disembodiment, and

Early Haitian Literature Elizabeth Kelly 15
2 White and Black Zombies: How Race Rewrites the Zombie
Narrative Cécile Accilien 30
3 Decolonizing the Zombie: I Walked with a Zombie’s Critique of
Centrist Liberalism Stephen Shapiro 40

Part Two Zombie World-System

4 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past Frank Jacob 61

5 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone”: The Creaturely and
Ecological Zombie Josephine Taylor 74
6 Undead, Undeader, Undeadest: Narrating the Unevenness of
Ecological Crisis in Nana Nkweti’s “It Just Kills You Inside”
Fiona Farnsworth 89
7 Zombie Proletkino: Labor, Race, and Genre in Pedro Costa’s
Casa de Lava Thomas Waller 106
8 “It Feels Like I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs in an
Intense and Powerful Way”: Netflix, Santa Clarita Diet, and
the Neoliberal Feminist Encounter with Pleasure
Politics Roxanne Douglas 121
vi Contents

Part Three Zombie Decolonial

9 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique: Beyond Man, Nature,

and the Posthuman in Folklore and Fiction from South
Africa Rebecca Duncan 141
10 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement: Ahmed
Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad Netty Mattar 159
11 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie”: Portrayal of the
West in Contemporary Indian Zombie Literature and
Cinema Abhirup Mascharak 176
12 From the Mountain to the Shore: Migration, Water Crisis, and
Revolutionary Zombies from Haiti to Peru Giulia Champion 191

Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice: An Afterword Stephen Shapiro 209

Notes on Contributors 215

Index 218
 A
­ cknowledgments

The editors of this book would like to thank all the contributors of this collection
for sharing their stimulating and outstanding research. It has been a pleasure
to work with a group of such exceptional scholars. We are also thankful to the
Bloomsbury Editorial Team for their precious and generous assistance.
viii
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie
Roxanne Douglas and Giulia Champion

This collection addresses the need to decolonize the zombie as a figure of

(popular) culture. Hence, one might wonder why a zombie is not on the cover
of this book. First, it is because images of zombies are often embedded within
the same ethos this collection aims to challenge. Indeed, the zombie is not
merely a blood-thirsty and blood-stained ghoul or a highly racist and racialized
representation of formerly colonized or exploited communities. The zombie is
so much more, as all the chapters in this collection evidence. The zombie can
also be a metaphor for the demonization of different forms of “otherness,” a
conceptualization that is itself highly problematic. Indeed, in colonial and neo-
imperial cultural productions and consciousness, exoticizing difference often
means making it monstrous. It is often what the zombie has represented in
Haiti’s history of exploitation, and while chapters in this collection challenge
the fact that the zombie merely represents slavery and exploitation, we would
be remiss not to acknowledge this reality. As Joan Dayan notes, the zombie is
a multifaceted term: “An especially important definition is that of Moreau de
Saint-Méry, who presents for the first time in writing the night world of what he
names revenans (spirits), loupgaroux (vampires), and zombis, which he defines
as a ‘Creole word that means spirit, revenant’.”1 The zombie’s status between life
and death points to another demonized “in-betweenness,” the racialized one of
hybridity and miscegenation, another anxiety haunting Western consciousness
and cultural productions strongly present in the Americanization (read the
United States) of the Haitian zombie, explored in Cécile Accilien’s and Giulia
Champion’s chapters. Hence, the zombie has a complex and importantly colonial
history, and as a “revenant” it thus has a haunting presence like a spectral figure,
often returning to the physical realm because of unfinished business; and what
business is left more unfinished than the (de)colonial project?
2 Decolonizing the Undead

This collection identifies different cultural productions and contexts that

need decolonization and reconsideration, and the image on the cover embodies
this need: the skulls and scythe echo representations of the grim reaper that are
often present over October and November as Europe and the United States take
over and capitalize on two celebrations that have been colonized and distorted by
these spaces: Hallowe’en and el Día de los Muertos. The Celtic and the Mexican
holiday, the latter also celebrated in different form across different countries in
the Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin America, have been taken over to sell,
as much as the zombie sells in popular culture. This phenomenon of cultural
holiday appropriation in the context of the Día de los Muertos is incisively and
beautifully explained by the Puerto Rican-American author Aya de León in
“Dear White People/Querido Gringos”:

You arrived at El Día De Los Muertos like a Pilgrim, starving, unequal to survival
in the land of grief, and the indigenous ceremonies fed you and took you in and
revived you and made a place for you at the table. And what have you done?
Like the Pilgrims, you have begun to take over, to gentrify and colonize this
holiday for yourselves. I was shocked this year to find Day of the Dead events
in my native Oakland Bay Area not only that were not organized by Chican@s
or Mexican@s or Latin@s, but events with zero Latin@ artists participating,
involved, consulted, paid, recognized, acknowledged, prayed with.2

El Día de los Muertos is a time in which one celebrates a state of communion

with one’s lost loved ones, a state that exists outside of this specific date and
day and is a continued practice. A practice that in the necropolitics of today is
further crucial as noted by Shiv R. Desai in a recent study wherein he investigates
how the honoring and mourning of lost loved ones becomes further crucial
when marginalized communities’ lives continue to not be seen and treated
as important. Shiv R. Desai’s publication considers how, “through a Youth
Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project,” using a Día de los Muertos float
can create a space for the mourning of extrajudicial death to achieve critical
hope and radical healing.3 This study, which is focused on the Black Lives Matter
(BLM) movement, also intersects with Christina Sharpe’s important work In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Sharpe elaborates a complex theorization
of “living in the wake,” a phrase to which she attributes multiple facets and
meanings. Crucially, she explains that one of its elements is the idea of living in
“a past that is not the past”:
The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching;
new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery, of undoing the
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie 3

“racial calculus and . . . political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago”
(Hartman 2008, 6) and that live into the present. . . . With this as the ground,
I’ve been trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past.
A method along the lines of a sitting with, a gathering, and a tracking of
phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples any
and everywhere we are.4

Can academic discourse create a space that mourns as well as memorializes

inequalities? All the while recognizing our own limitations, some of which are
crucial for the authors of this introduction who recognize their own intellectual
colonization as white European women. What are the different meanings of
colonization when it is practiced by white “Western” academics? We hope that
this collection, which is an international collaboration and therefore attempts
to open a space to different voices, though still one that is privileged given the
realities of contemporary academia, can begin to address some of these questions.
And this is also what the cover represents: returning, or revenant, images of
colonized cultural productions and practices coming back, or haunting, our
contemporary epistemologies demanding to be returned to their initial cultures
and respected for what they are. They demand that we learn from them rather
than try to constantly define them from our own point of view. So, what can we
learn from zombie tropes across the world?

­Decolonial Zombie Scholarship: Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham is dressed in a striped black-and-white creole gown; the

beat of the drum remains quick and steady as she holds her body taught, closes
her eyes, and tilts her head to one side. Her body jolts with the rhythm as she
removes the outer layer of her dress to reveal her white, linen underdress; her
arms and shoulders, like her feet, are bare. She shakes her head with a pained
expression and removes her headdress that matched her beautiful, ruffled
gown, now spirited away by someone in the dance company. Her body remains
compelled by the rhythm of drums as she is drawn closer and closer to her
vodou master. Dunham is dancing the part of Louloise, who, in this “zombie
scene” of the L’ Ag’ Ya (1938), also known as “Ballet Creole,”5 has been bewitched
by a vodou master and has become a zombi of Haitian folklore. According to
Dunham herself, “legends of zombies—the dead come to life or the living so
anesthetized by drugs as to appear dead.”6 Louloise’s lover steps between the two
figures and pushes her and the zombie master apart, breaking his captivating
4 Decolonizing the Undead

spell, and commencing the ag’ya, the fighting dance of Martinique. Dunham is
not only a dancer, she is a scholar who practices dance.
This representation of the zombi might be a far cry from the image of the
“halloweenified” zombie that many reading this volume may be familiar with—
in Dunham’s ballet, there is no hand being thrust out of the earth next to a
gravestone, no eerily quiet shopping mall, and certainly no brain-hungry hoard.
Zombies as we know them today are, as Giulia Champion notes in her chapter in
this volume, monsters made by capitalism, for capitalism. In the contemporary
Western popular imagination, the zombie shuffles around shopping malls as per
the now ubiquitous George Romero tropes. However, the story of capitalism
cannot be disentangled from that of colonialism, and neither can that of the
zombie. According to Sarah Lauro, precisely due to its history, the zombie makes
for “a convenient bogeyman in times of economic crisis, such as the great, global
recession that marred the first decade of the new millennium.”7 Colonialism is the
extraction of value from lands and peoples by a colonizer who does not belong
to that land through violent means, while also dispossessing previous, native,
inhabitants of that land. Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias point out that when
we discuss European colonialism as exceptional, and often that is what we mean
when we talk about “colonialism” in general, it is because of “the scale of empire
not just geographically but in having imposed a single universalizing narrative of
values, beliefs, and politics, ushering in the beginning of modern globalization.”8
European colonialism not only changed the geopolitical landscape but also,
through violent means, formulated the modern ways in which we think of race,
nation, value, and our own position(s) in the world. Part of this colonizing
project was the transatlantic trade of enslaved West African people. Similarly,
colonialism has given popular culture just one version of the zombie, when it is
a figure much more multifaceted and complex, as the different chapters of this
collection demonstrate.
Decolonialization in the academy is about more than de-centering white
Western voices; it is about the very question of how we generate knowledge, as
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue.9 It is about the repatriation of knowledge,
and perhaps even stories. Dunham was a dancer and anthropologist; she
understood that the body itself can express knowledge. We draw attention
to her work in this volume about decolonizing the zombie for a number
of reasons: first, her scholarship did not align with European, colonial
ontologies, or ways of making knowledge. Her methods of movement and
expression, now known as the Dunham dance technique, “continue to define
the style” of American concert dance, yet “most young dancers do not know
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie 5

about her contributions.”10 This perhaps makes Dunham, or at least her

contributions to knowledge and art, somewhat zombified: her “Africanized
principles of movement” such as “a flexible torso and spine, swiveling pelvis,
odd isolations of arms and legs, the polyrhythmic and syncopated playfulness
of the body” live on, animated, without much acknowledgment of where they
came from.11
Dunham was an African American woman, born in Chicago in 1909, and so
it is unlikely that she would have known about her precise ethnic origins if her
family were in the United States due to the kidnap and enslavement of Black
African people. Her research trip to Haiti in 1935 which inspired L’ Ag’ Ya was
perhaps in itself a repatriation: while there were plantations which relied on the
labor of enslaved people on the US mainland, Haiti is the only site where revolts
successfully overthrew slavers and established a sovereign state. One wonders if
Dunham’s interest in Haiti was what we would now call decolonial, Sally Sommer
writes that Dunham “was never fully accepted by the American anthropology
community . . . because she was not an ‘objective’ observer. Dunham got down
and danced with the people.”12 Objectivity, logic, and emotive detachment
are mainstays of Enlightenment European knowledge production, whereas
Dunham was perhaps embodying a generational knowledge and culture that
was otherwise denied to her due to the enslavement of her own ancestors. She
therefore devised dances that were “composites of actual dance rituals and on
the other fictitious treatments often based on a story, Dunham made no claim
to be totally ethnographic. In the concert halls and theatres, she expected her
audiences to be enlightened and entertained by art, not anthropology.”13 Dunham
represents a figure at the nexus of art and knowledge, of embodied practice
and academic rigor, and perhaps offers a road map as to how to consolidate
the realities of European encroachment and violence with indigenous cultural
histories. Vèvè A. Clark points out that “the form of the ballet is creole in every
sense of the term; that is, it is born of the American sensibility and mixes African
and European elements.”14 The zombie as we know it today is perhaps in the
spirit of Dunham’s creolization of dance: it is a composite of Haitian folklore,
and US-centric fears, primarily about the economy.
It has been recorded by a number of scholars that the zombie emerges as
a symbol of the anxieties of enslaved Black people in Haiti, who themselves
were extracted and taken to the land which had been violently seized from the
indigenous Taíno populations.15 Lauro details how “the zombie is an ‘American’
monster only in the sense that it comes directly out of a history of colonialism,
enslavement, exploitation, and appropriation. The zombie’s lineage can be
6 Decolonizing the Undead

traced to African soul capture myths that were carried to the New World
aboard slave ships bound for the colonial Caribbean.”16 In this folklore, a zombi
is controlled by a master, left “perpetually in a semiconscious state in between
living and dead . . . In its earliest iteration, the zombi was read as symbolic of
the Caribbean country’s past as a plantation economy built on slave labor:
drained of its own resources and existing only for the benefit of others.”17
The zombie as we know it today, titillating in its apocalyptic possibility, and
sometimes ridiculous in iterations such as Shaun of the Dead and The Dead
Don’t Die, emerges from the fears of being controlled and dehumanized that
were felt by enslaved people. The zombie, we argue in this edited collection,
can and should be decolonized: this collection asks, how might our readings
of the zombie, now a global figure, change or renew if we were more attentive
to its roots? How does the colonial history of the zombi reanimate what the
zombie might really be a tool to think about? What is at stake in the metaphor
of the undead?

This Collection

Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film,

and Media takes a new perspective on the rich allegory of the zombie using
decolonial and non-Western approaches. With a diverse set of contributors,
this edited collection reconsiders the zombie, as well as exemplifying such
decolonizing practices for the contemporary Western university. The collection
contains essays that consider the zombie in the postcolonial imaginary, including
questions around hegemonic categories such as race, gender, and nation. The
essays in the collection range from considering the significance of the zombie
from Latin America, to Japan, to India, to the presence of the zombie on Netflix.
Through a transdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue, and a diverse range of
approaches and materials in the collection, Decolonizing the Undead complicates
and challenges Western-based cultural understandings of the zombie’s allegorical
weight and value.
The zombie has captured the imagination of the West, particularly the United
States, since 1932, when White Zombie, a film directed by Victor Halperin, burst
onto screens. Hailed as the first zombie flick, the film follows a young white couple,
Madeline and Neil, who come to Haiti for their honeymoon. Madeline is set
upon by a white “voodoo” master, Murder Legendre, played by Bela Lugosi, and
becomes the titular white zombie. The film was based on William B. Seabrook’s
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie 7

The Magic Island (1929), a travelogue which imported the zombie to the American
popular imagination. Lauro points out that
the zombie’s uptake in U.S. popular culture was given life by an initial interest
in the folkloric Vodou zombie, but the first films exoticized the Caribbean and
eroticized racial difference in ways that were deeply problematic. The popularity
of the monster, along with the fact that, as a creature derived from folklore, there
was no estate to whom one had to pay copyright . . . ensured the reproduction
and revision of the zombie’s narrative.18

In other words, the zombie of US popular culture is a figure appropriated

precisely because it could not be repatriated under copyright laws that prioritize
individual ownership of knowledge, art, and stories. Lauro goes on to note that
“this whitewashing of the zombie . . . represents a cultural appropriation of a
myth that, ironically or aptly, was itself about appropriation—specifically, the
appropriation of labor and life under colonial slavery.”19 Therefore, the figure of
the zombie as Anglophone audiences know it today emerges due to the value that
could be extracted from it by Hollywood, aligning with its Haitian roots. What
is missing from US-centric visions of the zombie, however, is its emancipatory
possibilities and symbolism that its folkloric form took. A number of chapters
engage with this premise. It is worth noting that we have elected to spell zombie
as “zombie” in this volume (unless a quote spells it otherwise), over “zonbi,”
“zombi,” or “zombie.” This choice has been made to make the text discoverable in
searches of the emergent field in library and bookseller databases and websites;
the marketability of a volume like this, ironically, drives some editorial choices.
It likewise does not escape us that scholars and students who will use this
volume will selectively extract value from its pages, perhaps through a digitized
search function. Likewise, we have chosen to avoid using the spelling “voodoo”
(unless a quote spells it otherwise), to denote the vodou religion throughout
the collection, as the former spelling was popularized as a way of othering and
exoticizing the religion in Anglophone medias about zombies. In not using
this spelling, our aim is to afford dignity and respect to the vodou religion and
cultural artifacts such as the zombie which have been otherwise appropriated.

Chapter Summaries

This volume is structured into three parts. The first, “Thinking Zombies,”
considers the ways that the zombie performs as an ontological frame, that is
to say, how the zombie allows us to think about ourselves and our places in the
8 Decolonizing the Undead

world. For instance, Elizabeth Kelly’s chapter, “‘Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . . ’:
Dessalines, Disembodiment, and Early Haitian Literature,” considers how the
fractured body of Jean Jacques Dessalines, who declared Haitian independence,
characterized Haitian nation-building during and after the revolution. This is
followed by Cécile Accilien’s chapter—“White and Black Zombies: How Race
Rewrites the Zombie Narrative”—which traces the way in which the zombie
has gone from a racialized figure in the 1920s and 1930s US imagination in
writings such as Seabrook’s The Magic Island and the 1943 film I Walked with
a Zombie, and films such as White Zombie, to being incorporated into white,
family-friendly medias and activities. This chapter is then followed by Stephen
Shapiro’s “Decolonizing the Zombie: I Walked with a Zombie’s Critique of
Centrist Liberalism,” which considers the process of decolonizing knowledge
production, and how the zombie may offer a “sentinel” way out of the “past’s
rotting matter” by challenging liberal assumptions about race and postcolonial
subjectivities. These chapters taken together provide a historicized frame to
think through the process of thinking with the zombie as a decolonial figure to
drive scholarship.
The second part, “Zombie World-System,” examines how the zombie can be
used to reflect and expand our understanding of world-systems of knowledge,
goods and resources, culture, and informational systems. Frank Jacob’s “Samurai
Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past” details how the enmeshment of the zombie and
samurai in Yoroi: Samurai Zombie encapsulates a struggle between modernity
as defined by Western-centric capitalism and Japan’s own colonial past as a
means of negotiating a shifting national identity in a globalized world. Then,
Josephine Taylor’s “Crude Monsters in the ‘Extractive Zone’: The Creaturely and
Ecological Zombie” examines petrofiction’s encounter with the undead, and oil
and oil systems as manifestations of the undead in China Miéville’s Covehithe
and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. Taylor discusses how dehumanized,
unethical labor and ecologically disastrous practices becomes unmeshed in
industries that are crucial to maintaining Western standards of life. Following
this, Fiona Farnsworth’s chapter, “Undead, Undeader, Undeadest: Narrating
the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis in Nana Nkweti’s ‘It Just Kills You Inside’,”
investigates toxicity and environmental crisis in the Cameroonian short story.
Farnsworth’s chapter engages with questions of necropolitics and disaster
control, which are imbricated by the form of “It Just Kills You Inside.” Here she
discusses “the groundwork for a zombie story which is less about zombies and
more about stories: one which not only registers ecological crisis and its uneven
impact throughout the world-system but which foregrounds questions around
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie 9

the formal and aesthetic capacity of narrative to represent or obscure crisis

immediately and long-term.” This leads to Thomas Waller’s chapter, “Zombie
Proletkino: Labor, Race and Genre in Pedro Costa’s Casa de Lava,” which discusses
how the zombie genre itself persists and reappears in non-Western contexts over
the long durée “as constitutive and co-productive moments in capitalist value
production,” using Pedro Costa’s films, primarily Casa de Lava, as a case study.
Lastly, Roxanne Douglas considers how the “cognizant zombie” in Netflix series
Santa Clarita Diet sits at the nexus of neoliberal feminist ideologies, embodied
pleasure and agency, and digital data collection and control in “‘It Feels Like
I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs in an Intense and Powerful Way’:
Netflix, Santa Clarita Diet, and the Neoliberal Feminist Encounter with Pleasure
Politics.” These chapters not only offer a theorization of the zombie as a figure of
the market, as many scholars have discussed, but turn to world literary systems
to look toward the zombie as a complex figure that is not only of production but
a way to think about and beyond globalization.
The third and final part, “Zombie Decolonial,” builds on the principles of
the previous two parts to examine decolonial representations of the zombie.
Read together, these chapters offer a cross-section of how the zombie has
manifested in postcolonial artistic production. The part opens with Rebecca
Duncan’s chapter that examines the slippage between formal decolonization in
South Africa and how cultural values and production have remained colonized
in “‘De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique: Beyond Man, Nature, and the
Posthuman in Folklore and Fiction from South Africa.” In this chapter, Duncan
uses Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive as a case study to examine how “existing
occult narratives of zombification, proliferating across the sub-Saharan region,
register the social and ecological effects of the human as a colonial institution,
and how such discourses also potentiate a decolonial critique.” This chapter
is followed by “Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement:
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad,” by Netty Mattar. Going beyond
typical readings of Whatsitsname's body as the fragmentation of Iraq or the
wider Middle East, Mattar reads Whatsitsname and the zombie as comparable
“radical figures of unbelonging, their attachments to place severed, and yet they
are bound to the lands they are no longer a part of.” Subsequently, Abhirup
Mascharak’s chapter, “‘First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie’: Portrayal of
the West in Contemporary Indian Zombie Literature and Cinema,” explores how
the US-centric zombie is remade and reimagined in Raj Nidimoru and Krishna
D. K.’s Go Goa Gone to reflect contemporary anxieties over Westernization
through sexualization. This chapter usefully details the recent history of Indian
10 Decolonizing the Undead

zombie cinema, analyzing the adoption of the US-style zombie to ultimately

conservative ends.
This part concludes with Giulia Champion’s chapter, titled “From the
Mountain to the Shore: Migration, Water Crisis, and Revolutionary Zombies from
Haiti to Peru,” which investigates Julio Ortega’s novel Adiós, Ayacucho (1986).
This chapter first proposes to decolonize the Haitian zombie by excavating its
emancipatory potential in relation to the Haitian Revolution and to then use
this decolonized and emancipatory figure to read the Peruvian novel’s undead
protagonist, therefore, considering why both nations and the figure of the
zombie need new, decolonized, narratives. The collection then concludes with
an afterword by Stephen Shapiro, “Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice: An
Afterword,” which reminds us to “double-tap” on our way out of the collection:
this chapter explores the politics of reading the zombie figure through the
decolonial lens.

Conclusion

The idea and preparations for this collection preceded the Covid-19 pandemic,
but, like many projects, has seen lockdown orders come and go and has faced
disruption due to this. The Covid-19 pandemic saw many people return with
morbid fascination to virus-disaster medias, such as mobile game “Plague inc.,”
and films such as 28 Days Later and Contagion (Contagion briefly was one of
the UK’s top 10 films on Netflix in the early days of lockdown and supposedly
inspired the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom
during the pandemic, Matt Hancock’s vaccine rollout),20 zombie films and
stories being among them. However, a real worldwide disaster did not deliver
the individualist survival fantasy that was promised by zombie flicks. What did
become obvious quite quickly was, for good or bad, globalization means that the
health of one is the health of all. We are already in the hoard.
Furlough schemes and global supply chains likewise showed that the wealth of
one was the wealth of all: Covid-19 laid bare the ways in which we are connected
psychically, epidemiologically, environmentally, and economically on a global
scale. This is not to say that this is an even experience: indeed, the pandemic
only further emphasized existing global inequalities, which perdure in vaccine
distribution today. At a smaller scale, many of us were separated from our own
hoards, but, unlike the unruly glee offered by zombie cinema (after all, we watch
to ask, “What would I do? How would my life be without rent, social niceties,
 Introduction: Decolonizing the Zombie 11

taxes, social media, etcetera?”), many of us found ourselves alone, but with the
baggage of rent, social niceties, taxes, social media, etc., very much intact. The
zombie feels like a pressing image in the current moment, many experiencing
burnout and emotional exhaustion while the pressures of capitalism continue
to demand productive engagement with work. The figure on the cover of this
collection looks back at us: some may read this as confrontational, or strong,
while others may see the gape of the eye sockets as a blankness, a vacancy. In
either case, the appropriated figure of the undead regards us, too, reflecting how
we have internalized values that frame the cultural artifacts of colonized cultures,
such as the zombi. Drawing inspiration from Dunham’s enmeshment of the
emotive and ontological, this volume is an attempt to challenge colonial ways of
making knowledge by revisiting a revenant figure which lives on in Anglophone
cultures by asking, How do we decolonize how and why we know things through
the undead? The zombie is a metaphor, a tool to think with. Could we restore the
rebellious unruliness of the zombie, rising against the master and establishing a
new way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world?

Notes

1 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37.

2 de León, “Dear White People/Queridos Gringos.”
3 Desai, “Remembering and Honoring the Dead,” 768.
4 Sharpe, In the Wake, 13, my emphasis.
5 Dunham, Katherine Dunham Performing Ballet Creole (1952) | British Pathé.
6 Dunham, Island Possessed, 179.
7 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
8 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 69.
9 Tuck and Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
10 Sommer, “Katherine Dunham.”
11 Sommer, “Katherine Dunham.”
12 Sommer, “Katherine Dunham.”
13 Clark, “Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue,” 148.
14 Clark, “Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue,” 149.
15 Cohen, “Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology)”; Lauro, “Introduction”; Dunham,
Island Possessed.
16 Lauro, “Introduction,” x, xi.
17 Lauro, “Introduction,” x, xi.
18 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
12 Decolonizing the Undead

19 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
20 Heritage, “Matt Hancock’s Vaccine Rollout Was Inspired by Contagion. Here’s What
He Should Watch Next.”

Works Cited

Clark, Vèvè A. “Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue.” Black American Literature Forum
16, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 147–52.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology).” Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (86) (2012): 397–412.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing
Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. (Culture and Economic Life).
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Dayan, Colin. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Desai, Shiv R. “Remembering and Honoring the Dead: Dia de Los Muertos, Black Lives
Matter and Radical Healing.” Race Ethnicity and Education 23, no. 6 (November 1,
2020): 767–83.
Dunham, Katherine. Island Possessed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Dunham, Katherine. Katherine Dunham Performing Ballet Creole (1952) | British Pathé.
London: British Pathé. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSTuO5E9_1g&ab_
channel=BritishPath%C3%A9. Accessed August 7, 2021.
Heritage, Stuart. “Matt Hancock’s Vaccine Rollout Was Inspired by Contagion. Here’s
What He Should Watch Next.” The Guardian, February 4, 2021. https://www.
theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2021/feb/04/contagion-film-matt-hancock-covid-
vaccine-policy-hollywood. Accessed September 22, 2021.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. “Introduction: Wander and Wonder in Zombieland.” In Zombie
Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, vii–xxvi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017.
León, Aya de. “Dear White People/Queridos Gringos: You Want Our Culture but
You Don’t Want Us—Stop Colonizing the Day of the Dead.” Blog. Aya de León
(blog), October 31, 2014. https://ayadeleon.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/dear-
white-peoplequeridos-gringos-you-want-our-culture-but-you-dont-want-us-stop-
colonizing-the-day-of-the-dead/. Accessed September 22, 2021.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2016.
Sommer, Sally. “Katherine Dunham: African-American Dancer, Choreographer,
Anthropologist, Writer, Activist and Voodoo Priestess.” The Guardian, May 23,
2006. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/may/23/guardianobituaries.
booksobituaries. Accessed August 7, 2021.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
 ­Part One

Thinking Zombies
14
 ­1

“Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .”: Dessalines,

Disembodiment, and Early Haitian Literature
Elizabeth Kelly

Revolutionary Saint Domingue has been codified in a number of striking

narratives that are consistently focused on tortured bodies—the ravaged bodies
of the enslaved populations, the women raped, the men, women, and children
tortured, and the victims of mass execution. While contemporary histories move
toward considering the ideological motivations for the series of conflicts and
revolts that comprise what we now call the Haitian Revolution, representations
of these events by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century eyewitnesses,
biographers, and historians outside of Haiti instigated particular narratives
of violence and suffering that persist today. Interestingly, the revolutionaries
themselves and the growing Haitian literary communities of the early nineteenth
century also developed a competing discourse surrounding the body and the
spirit that laid a fertile groundwork for considering the zombie in nineteenth-
century Haitian contexts.
For Jean-Jacques Dessalines, famous for declaring Haitian independence in
1804 and for his military and political exploits, Haitian identity was embodied
in his person, both unrestrained by enslavement and Western morality
and powerfully weaponized against the French. He stages his own body as
representing a triumphant figure in which various seen and unseen forces
might be unified as a nation, and reads the remains of the French dead as
testifying to that power. Nineteenth-century Haitian historians painstakingly
detailed the events surrounding Dessalines’ death and dismemberment, paying
close attention to how his parts were sold and then recollected. They created
a narrative that reinscribed the power of Dessalines’ body, and Joan Dayan
argues that Massillon Coicou’s 1906 play, L’Empereur Dessalines (The Emperor
Dessalines), reinvigorated these narratives by announcing Dessalines’ ascension
16 Decolonizing the Undead

into the Vodou Cosmology as Ogou Desalin, a lwa, or spirit intermediary linked
to war, attachment to land, and sovereign power. Coicou’s preface argues that the
act of reassembling Dessalines’ body signals the embodiment of the new nation,
placing both these values and Dessalines’ body as central to Haitian identity.1
Nearly seventy years before Coicou’s play, Ignace Nau, an already prominent
literary figure in Haiti and France, serially published Isalina, ou, Une scène
créole (Isalina, or, a Creole Scene) in La Revue des Colonies (1836–7). This text
is commonly considered the first piece of Haitian prose fiction.2 The tale centers
on a love triangle and highlights a seemingly picturesque rural Haitian existence
until, upon hearing that the eponymous character has been attacked, the village
elders remark, “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” (there are zombies involved in
this . . .). The text presents the zombie as a form of disembodiment empowered
to resist the confines of rural Haitian culture. The zombies haunting Nau’s text
can be profitably read as an extension of Dessalines’ modes of thinking about the
relationship between the body and the spirit, situating the disembodied figure
as central to Haitian life in the new nation. The Haitian zombie arose within a
set of existing popular narratives surrounding embodiment and disembodiment
long before the twentieth century, presenting a resistant figure not only limited
to resisting colonial power but also extended into the nation of Haiti.

Toussaint Louverture, Kinship, and the Suffering Body

Although the disembodiment of Dessalines has been widely studied and his
understanding of the relationship between the body, the disembodied spirit, and
the new nation is much more radical and pronounced than his revolutionary
predecessor’s, Haitian sensibilities surrounding that relationship arise from
Toussaint Louverture’s treatments of the body and the body politic. Nineteenth-
century historians and biographers of Toussaint Louverture tended toward
formulaic characterizations that very much fed into existing discourses casting
slaves and former slaves as heroic Africans, natural healers, and saviors of white
bodies. Louverture himself carefully negotiated his world of letters, and well
understood the effects of recording his own interpretations and motivations in
the massive volume of proclamations, letters, and journals he continued to write
until his death. Throughout his writings, Louverture consistently relied upon a
well-defined set of bodily metaphors to negotiate his complex relationships to
French colonial officials, Haitian colonial subjects, and eventually the Haitian
people. Louverture stages French officials as father figures and the French in
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 17

general as his brothers. As conflicts rise, he begins to refer to what would become
the Haitian people as “brothers,” and eventually positions himself as the “true
father of all blacks,” as opposed to the French, who have become “idolatrous
fathers.” Eventually, he stages both French and revolutionary betrayals as
wounding his body. Louverture’s radical repositioning of black embodiment
began a mode of thinking that evolved through Dessalines’ proclamations
and eventually through the disembodied spirits (or zombis) of early Haitian
literature. The clear shift in bodily metaphors between Louverture’s and
Dessalines’ writings is not unlike the dual readings of the zombie figure, who
has been read as “not merely an allegory for slavery, but . . . also a representative
of resistance.”3
Well aware of the Eurocentric perceptions of the colony and the precariousness
of his alliances with the French, Louverture figured his identification with French
Republicanism as a bodily experience, describing his reactions to mistreatment
of French prisoners and the fate of his country in bodily terms. In a letter dated
May 18, 1794, Louverture wrote, “My heart bled and I shed tears over the
unfortunate fate of my country . . . My heart is broken to contemplate the event
that occurred against a few unfortunate whites who were victims in this affair. I
am utterly unlike many others who witness scenes of horror in cold blood.”4 He
again calls attention to his French heart and its accompanying humanity, noting
that on entering Petite Rivière in February 1796, the pleas of the women and
children of color “created in me so much emotion that I could only listen in this
moment to my French and humane heart; I gave them their lives, the women
and all the men.”5 Louverture appears to be defending his decision to spare the
population, particularly the men who may well have participated in fighting for
the enemy. In this way, he skillfully avoids any critique of his decision. In both
instances, Louverture inscribes his sympathies and his alliances on his body, and
by extension on the body politic of the country.
Louverture also tended to refer to his relationships with the French in
general, particular French leaders, and, later, the Haitian population, in familial
terms that extend his metaphors of bodily relation. The most striking and well-
preserved examples of this are found in his correspondence with General Étienne
Laveaux, the interim governor-general of Saint Domingue from 1793 to 1796.
Throughout their correspondence, Louverture repeatedly and warmly addresses
Laveaux as mon père (my father); his understanding of the paternal relationship
as a corporeal bond reaches its apex in February 1796. Laveaux faced growing
unrest in the Northern Department, which eventually led to Laveaux’s capture,
Louverture’s rescue, and the latter’s appointment as governor-general of the
18 Decolonizing the Undead

colony. Well aware of Laveaux’s perilous situation and his own potential to rise
to power, Louverture pledged his loyalty to Laveaux, writing:
general, Toussaint is your son, he cherishes you; and your grave will be his, and
he will support you at the peril of his life; his arm and head are always at your
disposal and if he has to succumb, he will carry with him the sweet consolation
of having defended a father, a virtuous friend, and the cause of liberty.6

­ ere Louverture stages his own feelings for Laveaux as instigating physical
H
reactions (“tears of tenderness”) and establishes a linkage between the lives of
these men that reaches beyond a metaphorically filial relationship. In positioning
himself as a loyal son, Louverture creates a bodily metaphor that preempts his
succession to power. Louverture’s loyalty is also coded as a commitment of his
body (arm and head) and even his death to Laveaux’s cause, a connection that
would be echoed and reinterpreted by Dessalines.
While the intense, personal loyalty Louverture’s writings depict toward
Laveaux was certainly more steadfast than his loyalties to the French in general,
metaphors of kinship were rampant throughout his writings. The tumultuous
relationship between Louverture’s armies and the French is coded as one of
broken familial bonds, with Louverture writing to Laveaux on May 18, 1794, “I
was abandoned by the French, my brothers. But my late experience has opened
my eyes to these treacherous protectors.”7 As loyalties shifted throughout the
year, and his own reconciliation with the French seemed more possible, on
March 22, 1795, Louverture juxtaposed the French, whom he coded as kin,
with the Spanish, English, and royalists, to whom he assigned a cannibalistic
(and extra-familial role), stating that “the French are our brothers, the English,
the Spanish, and the royalists are ferocious beasts who only caress to suck at
their leisure, until they are satiated, the blood of their women and children.”8
The relationship between Louverture’s enemies and the people he addresses is
described as a potential corporeal nurturing, as a mother breastfeeding a child,
that has been perverted into a very different formulation of bodily nourishment
in cannibalizing women and children.
Louverture often relied upon familial relationships to code shifting loyalties,
frequently positioning himself moving up on a patriarchal ladder. In May 1795,
Louverture wrote to Laveaux about the rebellion of Thomas, in which the
cultivateurs (in this context, agricultural laborers) “armed themselves against me
and I received for my pains a bullet in the leg, from which I still feel sharp pain.”9
Here Louverture focuses on the physical reminder he carries of the rebellion,
while aligning the injustice of their violence against him with physical pain.
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 19

Louverture later characterizes his suffering at the loss of his own sons to France
as a bodily wound, having been quoted in Madiou’s history and elsewhere as
stating, “My children, if you leave me, you open a wound in my heart that will
never be closed.”10 The metaphorical wound here is not inconsistent with his
language of wounding involved in his separation from the French, as mentioned
above. In a letter dated August 31, 1796, Louverture, a devout Catholic, exhorted
Laveaux to remember, “We imitate Jesus Christ who died and suffered for us, to
give us an example of a virtuous wise man is made to suffer, but, he who allows
our suffering will also console us. We must put all our hope in him.”11 Louverture
implies that both he and Laveaux must suffer in order to maintain virtue—a
theme he returns to later in his own writings.
Deborah Jenson also argues that Louverture uses tropes of bodily suffering
and healing in order to consider the psychological positioning of political
participation in the colony, noting that “through figures of pain and healing,
he conveys a vivid psychological and physical political subject.”12 Louverture’s
repeated references to the pain endured in what he saw as French colonial
leaders’ betrayal present political disenfranchisement as a direct form of physical
suffering, and one which could be healed through an aggressive treatment, which
he also describes in physical terms. In a letter dated only “la 24 l’an sixième de la
République” (the 24th of the 6th year of the French Republic, which was 1798),
Louverture references healing as follows:

Palliative remedies only flatter the pathology, and one must get to the source to
heal it. As you do not know the colony, I fear that you are being diverted from
all your good intentions with regards to the well-being of the republic, and are
encouraging your subordinates who will perish a thousand times for the colony
and the execution of the orders of the Directory that will be transmitted to us
by you.13

Jenson reads this letter as Louverture positioning himself as “not just the pained
subject, but also the doctor threatening to excise the pathology at its source.”14
The role Louverture establishes for himself poses sovereign power as a means of
resolving suffering and suggests that his own intervention may well be to heal
the disruption and abuses of colonial power in the colony.
Louverture’s writings also show that he was adept at understanding and
manipulating the already-existing discourse of suffering bodies in Haiti that had
previously been established in the first eyewitness accounts of the revolution.
Louverture consistently used metaphors of the bodily relation to sort out his own
complex ties to French colonial agents and positioned himself as a protector of
20 Decolonizing the Undead

white bodies when it best suited his goals. He expressed his filial loyalty and his
status as a protector of bodies as an extension of French Republicanism. He was
also adept at using metaphors of suffering and healing to consider the state of
the colony and later the nation, understanding his own political power as being
intimately connected to his written legacy, a disembodied form that did indeed
supersede the limits of his body, which was buried in an unmarked grave.15

­Dessalines the Disembodied

By contrast, Dessalines’ proclamations reveal a very different set of bodily

metaphors, although it is clear that some of the rupture Louverture coded through
bodies was carried into Dessalines’ writings as well. Dessalines highlighted an
understanding of embodiment that Fishburn argues was “particular to African
slaves, who crafted for themselves (and for us) a therapeutic anti-humanism (a
destructive hermeneutics), one that redefines what it means to be human, one
that is not based on the dualisms of mind and body, subject and object, self and
other—but on their necessary intertwining.”16 Dessalines’ own treatment of the
body in oral and written proclamations, at least as they have been preserved by
eyewitnesses and historians, presents a clear example of this. Like Louverture,
he attempted to assert himself as a protector of white bodies, but as relations
with French colonial powers became increasingly fraught, Dessalines began to
establish radical understandings of the Black body as a source of power and of
the new nation that included both the living and the dead. Dessalines’ entry
into the Vodou cosmology as a disembodied figure associated with a non-
Western past and a unifying figure for the past and present nation of Haiti is also
consistent with his own understandings of the roles of living and dead bodies in
creating the new nation.
Dessalines understood his own body as both a source of power and a weapon
in the fight for independence. He also expected his troops to consider the power
they might derive from their own bodies. Madiou reports that at the 1803 Battle
of Croix-des-Bouquets:
Dessalines saw the soldiers of the 8th flinching and rushed into the midst of
them, reviving their courage. At the same moment, two regiments of the four
fired the deadliest barrage. The shaken indigènes again lost ground. “Forward!
Forward” cried Dessalines, braving death with the front lines. The soldiers
responded to his voice “General, we have no powder.” Dessalines, boiling with
anger: “Take them with your nails and teeth!”17
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 21

Dessalines’ physical presence is figured as inciting courage in his soldiers, and

his references to the body as a form of weaponry speak to an understanding of
the body that is radically removed from the figure of the tortured Black body
Louverture often called upon. The soldiers’ bodies become a source of power
that had hitherto been unrealized, particularly in terms of its potential to resist
French control of the colony.
On the eve of independence, Dessalines also began to rely upon racial
difference as a rallying point to unify the Black and colored populations against
the French. After Louverture’s arrest in 1802, Dessalines spoke to a crowd of
African bands of rebels attempting to unify them on the basis of race and creole
identity:
No! No! We will never make peace with the whites! Look at my face!. . . Am I
white? Do you not recognize the hero of Crête-a-Pierrot? Was I white at Petite-
Rivière in Arbonite, when the expedition arrived? Ask these hills covered with
French bones. Will they name Dessalines the hero of these trophies?18

Dessalines not only points to race as the unifying factor in rallying the armed
forced in the final push for independence but also refers to the bodies of the
French as his trophies, or corporeal proof of his victory. He stages a direct
relationship between his own body as representing a triumphant modality in
which various forces might be unified and the remains of the French as testifying
to his power.
Dessalines also relies upon nineteenth-century understandings of racial
difference in his most radical proclamations, using them as a basis for rejecting
the ties of kinship and loyalty Louverture so carefully constructed in his letters.
In one of the longest proclamations included in Madiou’s history, Dessalines is
reported to have asked his audience, “What do we have in common with these
murderous people? Compare their cruelty to our patient moderation, their color
to ours, the extent of sea that separates us, our savage climate, we say enough
that they are not our brothers, that they will never become so.”19 Dessalines relies
upon the material conditions commonly associated with race (including climate
and geography) to construct the Haitian people as distinct from the French. In
doing so, he argues for a radical break from not only the French government
but also the assimilationist position Louverture often supported toward French
culture.
Like Louverture, at least in his later writings, Dessalines also relied upon
metaphors of kinship to unify the Black and colored populations in Haiti.
Dessalines’ understanding of kinship, however, extends beyond death in a
22 Decolonizing the Undead

way that is very much consistent with West African systems of belief and in
some ways echoes Louverture’s appeals to Laveaux. He begins by asking the
audience to
cast round your eyes on every part of this island; seek there your wives, your
husbands, your brothers and your sisters—what did I say? Seek your children—
your children at the breast, what has become of them? I shudder to tell it—the
prey of vultures. Instead of these interesting victims, the affrighted eye sees
only their assassins—tigers still covered with their blood, and whose terrifying
presence reproaches you for your insensibility, and your guilty tardiness to
avenge them—what do you wait for, to appease their manes? Remember that
you have wished your remains to be laid by the side of your fathers When you
have driven out tyranny, will you descend into their tombs, without having
avenged them? No: their bones would repulse yours.20

Dessalines’ own words speak to the connection between the independence of

the nation of Haiti and the dead, who here present disembodied figures that
have the power to accept or reject the living citizens of Haiti. The dead here are
positioned as integral to citizenship in the nation of Haiti and belonging in a
national, creole identity.
Positioned in the midst of a complex set of relations between Black bodies,
resistant spirits, and Haitian identity is another figure whose presence and
relation to the zombie cannot go unnoticed. Madiou’s history references a rebel
named Jean Zombi, a figure who is sometimes credited with an origin for the
figure of the Haitian zombie. Much has been made of this figure, although there
is no known historical record of him outside of Madiou’s history. Madiou’s Jean
Zombi is wild-eyed, apparently of mixed race, and having a particularly brutal
nature.21 Joan Dayan has famously argued that Jean Zombi’s presence here
signals the entry of the zombie as a creole figure that stands in for a new and
powerful identity, while others point out this figure as a means of “attribut[ing]
exceptional cruelty only to some individual figures such as Zombi rather than
the Haitian leaders and rank and file.”22 This reading is certainly consistent with
Madiou’s repeated emphases on Dessalines’ generosity and mercy.
Rather than entering the critical discussion of the origin of the zombie in
the figure of Jean Zombi, I argue that the surrounding embodiment and power
in Haiti shifts a great deal between Louverture’s and Dessalines’ written works.
Louverture carefully constructed a familial discourse that would empower
him through consolidating ties to French leaders and attempted to establish a
patriarchal relationship between the Haitian people and the French. As these
relations dissolved, Louverture represented the betrayals of the French as an
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 23

issue of familial relations gone wrong, and the break with French leadership as
a bodily sickness. Dessalines’ proclamations reveal an interesting genealogy of
his own treatment of bodies that promotes the kinds of understandings of the
relationship between the living and the dead that are central to West African
and Haitian systems of belief. While earlier in the revolutionary struggles
Dessalines struggled to fashion himself as particularly invested in showing
mercy to the French, he later began to move toward a radical understanding of
Haitian independence expressed through metaphors of the body and the spirit.
First, he began to understand the Black body in itself as a source of resistance
to colonial power. He consolidated this understanding in radically rethinking
notions of nationhood in order to constitute an alternative understanding of
the relationships between the bodies of the Haitian people and their conception
of nationhood. Finally, he drew on alternate understandings of the relationship
between living and dead bodies in demanding that the Haitian people answer to
the bones of the ancestors. Here he sets the stage for the modes of disembodiment
that would later appear as modes of resistance in Haitian culture and literature,
including the zombie in early Haitian literature.

Isalina’s Zombies

Joan Dayan proposes that Dessalines’ entry into the spiritual world of the
Haitian imaginary signals a genesis that began in the 1791 ceremony of Bois-
Caïman and continues today. While Dayan traces the path of the disembodied
Dessalines into modern oral cultures of Haiti, very little scholarship considers
the role of disembodiment in early Haitian creative literature. Scholarship on
Haitian literature tends to ignore Haitian prose contributions in the nineteenth
century, generally focusing on the vast literary movement of the 1920s and
1930s, much of which attempted to reinvigorate Haitian culture as a response to
the 1915 US occupation of Haiti. In the shadow of this wealth of poetry, plays,
and novels are the works produced in Haiti before the US occupation, many
of which creatively reimagine the complex relationships between the body, the
disembodied subject, and liberty and sovereignty in the new nation of Haiti.
Among these works are Ignace Nau’s Isalina, ou, Une scène créole, which
appeared in the Revue des Colonies in serial form between 1836 and 1837, and
is considered “the first known work of prose fiction in the Haitian literary
tradition.”23 Very few critics have responded to Isalina despite the relative fame
of the Nau brothers, at least in their time.24 In the only substantial contemporary
24 Decolonizing the Undead

study of Isalina, Anna Brickhouse reads the novella’s picturesque setting and
emphases on clear markers of rural Haitian culture, including ritual practices,
as answering the call for indigenous literatures in Haiti. Nau’s identification
of such rituals as central to rural life and Haitian identity also presents what
Kate Ramsey reads as a critique of the Boyer regime’s recent criminalization
of non-Western ritual practices.25 While Brickhouse argues that the role of
ritual in Isalina is to restore the balance of social structure, the novella also
presents forms of disembodiment as a powerful means of resisting the confines
of that structure. The story itself contains the first known literary reference to
the zombie, employing a means of disembodiment that, like Dessalines’ lwa,
contains the potential to resist political and social restrictions to liberty.
In short, Isalina is the story of a love triangle mediated by ritual practice. The
eponymous character is caught between Paul, her intended, and his baptismal
brother, Jean-Julien, who attacks her in a cemetery when she refuses his
advances.26 After the attack, the villagers suspect that Isalina has been bewitched.
On the advice of his mother, Paul seeks out the help of Galba, an oungan, or
ritual specialist, who determines that Isalina has been attacked by Jean-Julien
and bewitched by Marie Robin, a local practitioner of la science, a term that
carefully avoids the pejorative and illegal notion of sortilège, or malicious magic,
with substantial powers. Galba prescribes a set of rituals aimed at freeing Isalina
from the trance and eradicating Jean-Julien’s love for her. The ritual works in
curing Isalina, and the story ends with her formal betrothal to Paul.
At the height of the novella’s conflict, Isalina is forced to choose between
Paul and Jean-Julien, a choice that pits her physical safety against her social
reputation. Choosing the latter, she is pushed into a gravestone and injured. The
reader finds out that at some time after, she was “bewitched” by Marie Robin
at Jean-Julien’s request. Paul hears of the attack from some workers traveling
through the area, who report that “the situation was mysterious, and all the old
villagers believe there is witchcraft involved.”27 They give a scant description of
what they know about the attack, to which there were no witnesses, and end
their conversation with the question “Il y a zombies dans ceci, n’est-pas?” (There
are zombies involved in this, don’t you think?).28 While a lack of evidence (here
only the unconscious Isalina and an apparently unused knife) may indicate a
mystery of sorts, Nau’s readers may well have questioned why zombies might
come into play at this point in the story.
Although there is no mention of these zombies throughout the remainder
of the text, the reference stands in of the dual nature of the zombie in Haitian
tradition, which can refer to “both spirit, and, more specifically, the animated
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 25

dead, a body without mind.”29 Both meanings are reflected as the story unfolds.
Isalina is repeatedly referred to as having been murdered (“a été assassinée”)
despite the text’s insistence that she is very much alive, and the practitioner who
eventually returns her spirit to her body recognizes that her inanimate body is
under partial control by a competing ougan. There is also the possibility in the
text that, due to a lack of evidence, the villagers suspect a disembodied spirit
has, in fact, attacked Isalina. Here, Isalina’s disembodiment arises, at least on a
material level, out of her unwillingness to speak against her betrothed and defy
social constraints on her choice in lovers, and her body becomes what Dayan
calls “mindless” not only because of the ritual but because she becomes an object
over which the men battle through the ougans they employ.
Interestingly, Isalina’s condition can be registered on multiple levels within
the text. First, as the other characters’ treatment of her implies, she has been
rendered a zombie by an outside power. Second, as Brickhouse argues, “the
narrator suggests in the first section of the story that Isalina’s delirium and her
rejection of Paul have an empirical source, one that readers see firsthand in her
fall and the injury to her head.”30 Finally, the text lends itself to the implication
that her illness reflects her inability to pursue her own romantic choices. This
final possibility considers her ultimate powerlessness within the context of the
story; she can neither voice her choice in lovers nor protect herself from the very
real physical and social dangers she faces. The resolution, however, implies that
the first of these options is the most convincing. Considering Isalina bewitched,
Paul seeks out the help of Galba in freeing her.
Before accepting Paul’s request for his services, Galba asks a number of
questions that betray an awareness of several possible causes of Isalina’s illness,
the most telling of which is when he asks Paul how Isalina reacts to Jean-Julien.
Here, Galba’s investigation asserts the possibility that Isalina’s conduct may be
caused by unfaithfulness rather than being bewitched but goes on to perform
an investigatory ritual that involves several layers of disembodiment. Galba
begins the ritual alone and in silence, until Paul hears “voiceless moans and
convulsive sighs.”31 Galba returns from his trance “with a singular expression of
knowing” and asks Paul to gaze into a series of cards he has placed on a board.
The cards reveal the figures of Jean-Julien and Marie Robin through a means
that implies that their disembodied spirits appear there. The narrator writes “a
shadow passed over the card and settled there for a moment. The features were
the facsimile of a real person” that Paul recognizes as Jean-Julien.32 Galba then
asks Paul to gaze into a basin of water, which reveals the image of Isalina, kissing
Jean-Julien’s hand. The enraged Paul moves to shatter the basin, and Galba
26 Decolonizing the Undead

reminds him that what he sees are “only images.” Despite the immateriality of
the vision, Galba sprinkles powder into the basin and assures Paul that “Isalina
is saved” by his actions, asserting that he has been able to affect her bodily illness
and the discomfort of her mind through the images themselves.33
Brickhouse reads Galba’s intervention as resolving the central crisis of the
story—Isalina’s rejection of Paul. Brickhouse argues that “the end of the tale
established a new genealogy—and effectively restores what is salvageable from
the old, disrupted one—through the paternal figure of the papa-loi, to whom
Paul ultimately offers himself as his son.”34 Galba’s role here as a practitioner
is entirely consistent with conceptions of Vodou practice, which Kate Ramsey
notes are frequently thought of as “the entire range of spiritual and healing
practices undertaken within extended families and through relationships with
male and female religious leaders, called, respectively, ougan and manbo.”35 Nau’s
reluctance to specify such rituals as part of what many of his contemporaries
outside of Haiti would term “Vodou” can be read as portraying a more nuanced
and particularly Haitian understanding of the term that Nau did not assume his
readers would share.
Despite the patriarchal tone of the story, the character who suggests the
greatest potential for resisting the strict social structure is Marie Robin, a
practitioner who never actually appears in the story. Paul recognizes Marie
Robin in the Queen of Spades card Galba uses in the ritual, and his startled
reaction “What! Marie Robin! Eh! My God! I am so lost” implies a profound
respect for her power within the community.36 Marie Robin is herself entirely
absent from the story, but her disembodied intervention in the plot contains a
great deal of power to threaten the established social order.
Brickhouse’s reading centers on Nau’s story as answering a call for indigenist
literature in Haiti’s newly accessible public sphere and begins to address the
complex layers of patriarchal power at stake in such a tale. I would argue here
that Isalina’s disembodiment exposes her subjugated position in the face of
particularly gendered systems of power presented through the villagers, the
institution of marriage, and the men who use her body and her spirit as sites of
masculine struggle. Her disembodiment at the hands of Marie Robin allows for
an even more complex reading of the text; despite Marie Robin’s role as a hired
intermediary, the power to disrupt the genealogy Brickhouse identifies here
does provide a force of disruption within the text that is enacted and recognized
through Marie Robin’s disembodiment. While nineteenth-century creative
Haitian works were rarely widely disseminated, Isalina, often cited as the first
piece of Haitian prose fiction, was both published in a forum that facilitated
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 27

a relatively large reading audience and was thought of, at least by its author,
as presenting a uniquely Haitian text. Certainly its focus on disembodiment as
a means of both exerting and subverting social power establishes in a literary
context the importance of the relationship between the body and the spirit in
disrupting power dynamics in the early nineteenth century.
When we consider the rise of the zombie in nineteenth-century Haitian
contexts, it is fundamental to think about the ways in which a literary sphere
born in the midst of the Haitian revolution thought about power, bodies, and
the spirit. Louverture’s careful entry into a fraught discourse surrounding
Black bodies began as a means of writing back against narratives that both
helped and hindered Louverture’s causes. Deborah Jenson has noted that
“Where his successor Dessalines is today the popular hero of Haitian political
consciousness . . . it was Toussaint who forged a dialogue of tenuous peer
relationship with metropolitan and colonial leadership, and out of it an enduring
foothold for critique and mobility,” and that he did this through the world of
letters.37 Much of this critique was staged through repositioning kinship and
bodily relations, and despite the profound differences between Louverture and
Dessalines’ literary tactics, this critique carried forward as the new nation formed.
Juxtaposing the kinds of disembodiment both championed and posthumously
attributed to Dessalines to the literary treatment of disembodiment in a text like
Isalina creates an interesting arc of development for bodies and the disembodied
in Haitian contexts. The zombie, the apex of the disembodied figure moves
beyond an anticolonial figure, instead becomes a figure of unlimited potential
to critique, reimagine, and disrupt the exercise of power over bodies, no matter
the source of that power.

Notes

1 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 31.

2 It should be noted that “Le Mulâtre,” published in La Revue des Colonies in 1837
by Victor Séjour, the son of Haitian immigrants living in New Orleans, is now also
hailed as the first work of African American fiction.
3 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 31.
4 Nesbitt, Jean-Bertrand Aristide Presents Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian
Revolution, 9–10.
5 Laurent, Toussaint Louverture, 342–3. All translations of Laurent’s edition are mine.
6 Laurent, Toussaint Louverture, 347–8.
28 Decolonizing the Undead

7 Laurent, Toussaint Louverture, 104.

8 Louverture, The Haitian Revolution, 14.
9 Laurent, Toussaint Louverture, 185.
10 Madiou, Histoire D’Haiti, Vol. II, 208. All translations of Madiou are mine.
11 Laurent, Toussaint Louverture, 428.
12 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 60.
13 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 60.
14 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 60.
15 It is not without irony that Louverture’s prison notebooks are still held in the
Archives Nationales de France at Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, still marked by his blood, and
buried in the Marine Committee files. They are rapidly decaying and are protected
only by a thin folio of paper at the bottom of a box containing miscellaneous
correspondence.
16 Fishburn, The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative, 44.
17 Madiou, Histoire D’Haiti, Vol. 3, 87.
18 Madiou, Histoire D’Haiti, Vol. 2, 441.
19 Madiou, Histoire D’Haiti, Vol. 2, 147.
20 Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 263.
21 Hoermann, “Figures of Terror,” 159.
22 Hoermann, “Figures of Terror,” 159.
23 Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public
Sphere, 116.
24 Underwood, The Poets of Haiti, n.p. Ignace and Émile Nau were well known in
Haiti in the 1830s for their publication of Republicain, a literary magazine that was
censored by the Haitian government; Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian
Literature,” 1.
25 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 58–62.
26 The term frère de baptême (baptismal brother) in the most literal sense indicates
children baptized together, but in Haitian traditions, the term also implies extended
kinship ties.
27 Nau, Isalina, 41. All translations of Nau are mine.
28 Nau, Isalina, 42.
29 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37.
30 Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations, 116.
31 Nau, Isalina, 53.
32 Nau, Isalina, 55.
33 Nau, Isalina, 56.
34 Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations, 116–17.
35 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 7.
36 Nau, Isalina, 54.
37 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 47.
 “Il y a des zombies dans ceci . . .” 29

Works Cited

Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public

Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Daut, Marlene L. “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and
the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing.” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1
(2012): 49–72.
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Fishburn, Katherine. The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative.
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Hoermann, Raphael, “Figures of Terror: The ‘Zombie’ and the Haitian Revolution.”
Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 14, no. 2 (2016): 152–73.
Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the
Haitian Revolution. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011.
Laurent, Gerard M. Toussaint Louverture, à travers sa correspondence 1794–1798.
Madrid: Industrias Graficas España, 1953.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d’Haiti. Vols. 1, 2, & 3. Edited by Gérard M. Laurent. Port-
au-Prince: Editions Henri Deschamps, 1989.
Nau, Ignace. Isalina, ou, une scène créole. Port au Prince: Coucoune, 2000.
Nesbitt, Nick. Jean-Bertrand Aristide Presents Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian
Revolution. Edited by Nick Nesbitt, Introduction by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. London:
Verso, 2008.
Popkin, Jeremy. Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian
Insurrection. Edited and Translated by Jeremy Popkin. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
Rainsford, Marcus. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. Edited and
Introduction by Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2013.
Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
Underwood, Edna Worthley. The Poets of Haiti, 1782–1934. Translated by Edna
Worthley Underwood, woodcuts by Pétion Savain, glossary by Charles F. Pressoir.
Portland, ME: The Mosher Press, 1934.
 ­2

White and Black Zombies: How Race Rewrites

the Zombie Narrative
Cécile Accilien

Images of zombies in the United States are believed to have their origins in
encounters that soldiers had with Haitian Vodou during the US Occupation of
Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934. Since then, the fascination with zombies
as a concept and a cultural phenomenon has become a staple of US popular
culture. The zombie figure—a corpse that is under the control of a living human
being—has appeared in Michael Jackson’s 1983 music video “Thriller,” in which
he dances with a group of zombies, as well as in anime and manga comics, art,
and video games. Zombies are now so engrained in the US imaginary that in
2011, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called its
emergency preparedness plan the “Zombie Preparedness Campaign” to teach
the public about being prepared for various emergencies, including floods,
tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes.1 The plan contains the following
slogan: “Get a Kit/Make a Plan/Be Prepared.” Similarly, a nonprofit community
service and disaster preparedness organization based in St. Louis, Missouri, is
known as the Zombie Squad. After watching the British horror movie 28 Days
Later, a group of friends decided that zombies could be used as a metaphor to
help people think about how to be prepared for any type of real-life emergency.
The organization has a large online presence.2 The CDC and the Zombie Squad
appear to be taking advantage of the fact that, given the resurgence of zombies in
popular culture, the image of a zombie apocalypse will make people take disaster
preparedness more seriously.
Meanwhile, in Haiti, a Black and economically disadvantaged country in the
Global South that has been forced to bear the moniker “the poorest country in
the Western hemisphere,” the figure of the zombie continues to be frightening,
a symbol that references the ongoing power of histories of colonialism, slavery,
 White and Black Zombies 31

and imperialism. Haiti gained its independence from the French in 1804 after a
twelve-year revolt, yet the US government did not recognize the new nation for
over fifty years because acknowledging a Black country’s independence would
have forced it to deal with the presence of slavery in the United States. Slavery was
not only a very profitable business, it was also at the foundations of the nation’s
economy. Yet slavery was in part justified by white colonizers who cast Blacks as
savages who needed to be saved. Zombies are often conflated with “voodoo,” a
term that represents a biased misrepresentation of the Haitian Vodou religion.
The Vodou religion was brought to the so-called “New” World by people ripped
from the African continent starting in the seventeenth century, but into the
present day, the Vodou religion has been demonized by both Americans and
Europeans, and has served as propaganda for evangelists under the guise of
saving souls. “Voodoo” and, by extension, zombies have long been used to vilify
Haiti and to present Haitians as a people unable to govern themselves.
William Seabrook popularized the concept of the zombie for US audiences
in his sensationalist book The Magic Island,3 drawn from his experiences of
living in Haiti for two years during the 1920s.4 This account was the basis of
the film White Zombie (1932), directed by Edward Halperin, which originated
the genre.5 The film is a simple tale of a white couple who goes to Haiti to get
married. A plantation owner falls for the woman and, with the help of a “voodoo”
master, transforms her into a zombie. Some Haitians are represented as evil
beings who participate in the zombification of others. As Zachary Crockett and
Javier Zarracina note, “White Zombie explicitly stoked America’s worst fears
of voodooism and turned the spiritual belief system into a horror motif. Haiti
is presented as a primitive, orderless place where witchcraft and zombies run
rampant.”6 The title of the film expresses the operative assumption that zombies
are Black unless otherwise noted. Here, the zombie’s whiteness makes her more
terrifying in the context of the white popular culture of this era, with its fears of
miscegenation, because a white person becomes “Black.”
Toni Pressley-Sanon asserts that films such as White Zombie (1932) and I
Walked with a Zombie (1943) result from “the foreign white male imagination
[and] acted as cathartic expressions . . . of their fear of a black nation.”7 She further
notes that these films represent “white male imperialist longing for a return to the
colonial period.”8 But these films demonstrate, I think, something more complex
than simply colonialist nostalgia. Rather, they suggest that within these longings
for simplified power is hidden a sense of the deep wrongness of the basis of that
power. This is the continuation of the narrative of Haiti being a frightening and
unruly place—a narrative that began toward the end of the eighteenth century,
32 Decolonizing the Undead

with the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, as enslaved African and African-
descended people in Haiti rose up against the colonizers/enslavers. Thus the
power and fear of Haiti, in the way that it performs the ongoing raw wounds left
by slavery and colonialism in the white imaginary, seemed to potentially inflame
white guilt on a subconscious level, and was therefore relegated to the category
of irredeemable “other.”
The sequel to White Zombie, called Revolt of the Zombies (1936), along
with films such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943), was instrumental to Haitian
culture, and by extension Haiti itself, becoming synonymous with the zombie
narrative in US popular imagination. And since the 1968 movie Night of the
Living Dead, directed by George Romero, the concept of the zombie has been
used to describe various ills in our contemporary culture, be they ecological
disaster, racism, scientific excess, capitalism, or uncontrollable consumerism.9
In the United States, there was renewed interest in zombification from a
sociological and medical perspective with the publication of Wade Davis’ best-
seller The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard’s Scientist’s Astonishing Journey
into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic (1985), in which
he investigated indigenous plants that are used to zombify people. In the book
Davis explored the case of Clairvius Narcisse, who was zombified for a period of
two years, and came to the conclusion that this zombification was probably due
to the use of tetrodotoxin, a hallucinogenic plant known as datura, mixed with
cultural beliefs. Davis’ claims were challenged and criticized due to scientific
inaccuracies, but the book nonetheless served as inspiration for Wes Craven and
Bill Pullman’s popular horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), which
popularized zombie images and their connections to Haiti for a new generation.
The harm done by such characterizations is that Haitian people and Haitian
culture may be automatically linked to zombies. Zombies do not have human
qualities; they are not able to think and they attack other human beings. Thus, in
the US popular imaginary, Haitians themselves become zombie-like creatures,
“voodoo” practitioners, and devil worshippers; simply by virtue of their place of
birth, they have no morality, and they are represented as being rightly punished
because of this.
Race is central to portrayals of zombies in the United States—because
zombies have been incorporated into white forms of representation, they can
appear at an event such as a family celebration in the white Midwest, and yet
the frisson of fear they still generate in this context is owing to the obscured
fact of long-term misunderstandings of and biases against Haitian culture. As
a Haitian American who lived in Kansas from 2015 to 2020, I was fascinated
 White and Black Zombies 33

by an annual local phenomenon known as the Lawrence Zombie Walk. When I

attended my first Zombie Walk in October 2016, I was at once amazed, amused,
and annoyed by the performance. In this exclusively white, Midwestern setting,
the zombie figure had become the focal point of a celebration, fun for all ages.
When I attended the event, some people danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,”
while others visited so-called zombification stations or took “blood baths,” in
which they had fake blood poured on them. There were also the usual festival
staples, like face painting for adults and children and food trucks. Some zombies
wandered the street aimlessly, while others interacted with the crowd. At the
beginning of the walk, people generally gather in South Park at sundown and
walk down Massachusetts Street, the main street in downtown Lawrence, where
a large number of businesses are located, to watch the zombies. The colorful and
disturbing scenes included people with ripped-off clothing and lots of blood.
Some people pretending to be zombies spit blood at the crowd. There were also
groups of people in South Park with toy guns shooting at the zombies. One local
reporter described the scene:

Fake blood drips down his suit as the zombie shuffles down Massachusetts Street.
One arm clutches a brain and the other arm hangs by a thread and falls to the
ground. The zombie turns to the man next to him. “Can you give me a hand?”
he asks. Parade watchers laugh as the man picks it up and the two continue their
walk down the street. Terry Taylor and his wife, Liz Taylor . . . have attended the
Zombie Walk since the first one took place. They loved the event for the ability
to bring people together in the name of spooky things . . . For the Taylors, it was
especially important to make the Zombie Walk as friendly as possible. There’s
just a big, good community feeling of everyone coming together and enjoying
this—and that’s what it should be.10

All of this is staged and performed in the name of fun and service to the community.
People bring items to donate to the local food and homeless shelters, as well as to
the Lawrence Humane Society and ARC of Douglas County, an organization that
provides services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The Zombie Walk is a “family” event meant to entertain, ostensibly for a good
cause. One Zombie Walk participant commented,

I was talking to my friend about what if tourists were to come [to Lawrence] and
not knowing what is going on, go downtown and see all these zombies. What
would they do? I would freak out. I would be like, whoa, what is going on in
this town? If you didn’t know and you just kind of came by it would be really
awkward.11
34 Decolonizing the Undead

As the image of the zombie has fully entered the US mainstream, it has been
largely stripped of its power to truly terrify (in the assessment of this participant,
the scene is at most “awkward”).
As I observed the spectacle, I considered this simultaneous mockery and
adoption of the figure of the zombie. As performed by white residents of
Lawrence, the zombie had become unmoored from its origins, “othered” in
a way that seemed, erroneously, to have nothing to do with race whatsoever.
Images of the zombie in US pop culture are connected to the history of Haiti,
yet the reality of Haiti has often been erased from these images, creating a blank
space where the dominant culture inscribes its own values and anxieties. People
were apparently ignorant of the origins of the zombie trope and its connections
to race and the history of slavery and colonialism, not thinking in the slightest
about the history of what they were doing. They performed this identity freely,
unconscious of being observed by someone from Haiti with a strong sense of
what the zombie meant in other contexts. This is the performance of a power
differential that functions when members of the dominant culture adopt
signifiers from less dominant or actively oppressed cultures and not be held
accountable for reproducing relations of dominance.12
It is critical to counterbalance such popular culture representations of zombies
with portrayals of zombies by Haitian authors in order to avoid marginalizing
the origins of the concept and thereby in a sense seeming to tacitly accept the way
in which the dominant popular culture in the United States represents it. The
differences between how the zombie figure appears in Haiti and in Kansas, for
example, highlight the ongoing sociopolitical power of the United States, which
includes its capacity to decide when it wants to either denigrate or embrace a
particular “othered” cultural phenomenon. (To throw these dynamics into relief,
it is instructive to consider what would happen if the people impersonating
zombies in Lawrence, Kansas, were immigrants from Haiti or other islands in
the Caribbean.)
In the Haitian context, the zombie is generally not viewed as a sensational (if
tamed) image of otherness. In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a frightening figure.
Everything that surrounds the zombie narrative is evil and devoid of hope.13 The
term refers to someone who died of unnatural causes, such as murder, and whose
body lingered at the gravesite. If a witch doctor, or bòkò, found the corpse while
it was lingering at the grave, he or she could revive it and use it as a slave. (A
bòkò is generally defined as a magician who has the power to heal.) This creature
that exists in a state between life and death is then referred to as a zombie. In the
Haitian context, zombification is associated with enslavement, stolen labor, and
 White and Black Zombies 35

the exploitation of the laboring class. It is also a crime. Article 246 of the Haitian
Criminal Code states that it “[i]s considered attempt on life by poisoning the use
made against a person of substances which, without giving death, will cause a
more-or-less prolonged state of lethargy, regardless of the manner in which these
substances were used and regardless of the consequences.”14 The existence of this
law evidences the fact that in contemporary Haiti, zombification is not simply
a myth, or even just a metaphor. It is a practice that the law sees fit to regulate.
Although zombies are not, in fact, central to the practice of Vodou, there are
people who may call themselves manbo or hougan (Vodou priestess or priest)
or vodouyizan who, in fact, practice zombification. The late Ati Max Beauvoir,
considered to be one of the most respected hougan in Haiti and around the world,
proposed the following link between vodou, social justice, and zombification. He
noted instances when a vodouyizan may be zombified—for example, if someone
has committed a crime against the community or other people, because it is
believed that you should not kill people. According to Beauvoir, generally if the
person is judged as a criminal, the vodouyizan, in accordance with others in the
community, keeps the body but takes away the person’s spirit, which makes them
unable to function because they no longer have the willpower to act.15 Thus, the
zombification phenomenon may function as a way to gain justice—justice that
in this case exists outside the formal bounds of “the law.”
René Depestre points to the fact that many Haitian people believe in the real
presence of zombies in his novel Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988), which is
set in the southern Haitian town of Jacmel during the 1938 carnival. He writes:
According to Uncle Ferdinand, a zombie—man, woman, or child—is a person
whose metabolism has been slowed down under the effects of some organic
toxin, to the point of giving all appearances of death: general muscular
hypotonia, stiffened limbs, imperceptible pulse, absence of breath and ocular
reflexes, lowered core temperature, paleness, and failure of the mirror test. But
despite these outward signs of death, the zombie actually retains the use of his or
her mental faculties. Clinically deceased, interred and buried publicly, he or she
is raised from the grave by a witch doctor in the hours following the burial and
made to labor in a field (a zombie garden) or in an urban workshop (a zombie
factory). Whenever there are doubts as to whether or not someone has died of
natural causes, steps are taken to avoid all risks of zombification.16

In Haiti, as we can see clearly here, the zombie is primarily associated with fear.
Depestre riffs on the plot of the film White Zombie; the title character,
Hadriana, is a white French woman living in Haiti who, on the morning of her
wedding to a young Haitian man from an elite family, is transformed into a
36 Decolonizing the Undead

zombie after she drinks a mysterious potion. She collapses at the altar, and thus
her wedding becomes her funeral. The community is fascinated with Hadriana’s
race and complexion, so even though she is transformed into a zombie, their fear
is surpassed by their fascination with her whiteness, in a reference to the plot of
White Zombie. Through his conscious juxtaposition with an imperial narrative
of Haiti, Depestre indicates the way in which zombies and zombification register
very differently in the Haitian imaginary than they do in the US imaginary. For
instance, the zombifier Lil’ Joseph and his wife Faith zombify people in order to
exploit them. They have no scruples or morals:
Lil’ Joseph and his wife Faith.. showed up at the HASCO sugar factory leading
a party of ragged peasants, all of whom were raring to do some serious cutting
on the plantations of the American company. As they were being hired, these
men—their expressions dull and their eyes vacant—proved incapable of stating
their names. . . . Witnesses to the scene realized that they were dealing with a
zombified workforce—a bunch of poor wretches who had been taken one night
from their “final” resting place and made to slave away in the service of a cruel
master.17

It is no coincidence that the individuals who are zombified are working in

an American sugar company. Sugar production is intrinsically connected to
European colonialism and slavery in much of the Caribbean, and the Haitian
zombie is synonymous with slavery and with other malevolent and destructive
forces. Depestre writes, “The fate of the zombie might be compared to that of
the colonial plantation slave of old Saint-Domingue. Its destiny corresponds,
on the mystical plane, to that of the Africans deported to the Americas to
replace the decimated Indian labor force in the colony’s fields, mines, and
factories.” Indeed, he continues, the “zombie is in fact one of the traps of
colonial history—something Haitians might have internalized and integrated
into their own worldview. It could be a symbol of an imaginary world borne of
tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cacao, or spice—one of the many symbols of the
ontological shipwreck of man on the American plantations.”18 Zombies in the
Haitian context do not have agency and power—in fact, they are quintessentially
dis-empowered beings. It is worth noting that in this sense they are the polar
opposite of the zombie figures roaming around Lawrence, Kansas—individuals
who have chosen to adopt the guise of the zombie, and who are not scary
specifically by reason of their agency. In the Haitian context, by contrast, people
do not choose to be zombies—they are zombified, a fate not to be wished upon
anyone. In this rendering of a white zombie, Depestre calls attention to the fact
 White and Black Zombies 37

that white colonialists have coopted the figure of the zombie—but in the process,
they become zombified as well. Thus the process of systematized oppression
may ultimately devour those with power as well as those without it.
The white American fascination with zombies promises to continue, as is
evident from the movies and TV shows depicting zombies in various settings
and the fact that the zombie culture is an integral part of many people’s
worlds—yet as the participants in the Lawrence Zombie Walk turn themselves
into bloody and soulless entities, we see the meta-history of colonialism and
imperial oppression inscribed on white bodies. And in Haiti, which continues
to suffer the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, neo-
colonization, occupation, dictatorship, economic and political disempowerment,
and environmental disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, the zombie
remains a real and terrifying figure.

Notes

1 See https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm. See also Khan, “Preparedness

101.”
2 See Westhoff, “Doomsday Disciples.”
3 Seabrook, The Magic Island.
4 Two other films worth mentioning from that era are Ouanga, directed by George
Terwilliger (1936), and I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur
(1943).
5 Halperin, White Zombie.
6 Crockett and Zarracina, “How the Zombie Represents America’s Deepest Fears.”
7 Pressley-Sanon, Zombifying a Nation, 9.
8 Pressley-Sanon, Zombifying a Nation, 25.
9 Romero, Night of the Living Dead.
10 Counts, “How Local Business Brought Lawrence’s Annual Zombie Walk Back from
the Dead.”
11 “Lawrence, Kansas, Zombie Walk.”
12 We see this process unfolding as well, for example, in the musical Zombies, which
premiered on the Disney Channel, whose target audience is primarily children aged
six through sixteen. From the Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse to the Francisco Zombie
Walk and the Chicago Zombie March, zombies are also becoming an integral part
of tourism campaigns and local entertainment in the United States.
13 “Figure of exploitation par excellence and staple of the Vodou universe, the Haitian
zombie is a being without essence—lobotomized, depersonalized, and reduced
38 Decolonizing the Undead

through malevolent magic to a state of impotence. Without any recollection of its

past or hope for the future, the zombie exists only in the present of its exploitation.
It represents the lowest being on the social scale: a non-person that has not only
lost its humanity, but that has accepted, without protest, the status of victim” in
Glover, “Exploiting the Undead,” 107–8.
14 Guha and Boring, “Does the Haitian Criminal Code Outlaw Making Zombies?”
15 Saint-Louis, “My Interview with Max Beauvoir Part #3.”
16 Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, 127–8.
17 Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, 134–5.
18 Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, 169.

Works Cited

Counts, Katie. “How Local Business Brought Lawrence’s Annual Zombie Walk Back
from the Dead.” The University Daily Kansan, October 18, 2019. http://www.kansan.
com/arts_and_culture/how-local-business-brought-lawrence-s-annual-zombie-
walk-back/article_c9db301e-f1e3-11e9-8b5c-1bfd07fed771.html.
Crockett, Zachary, and Javier Zarracina. “How the Zombie Represents America’s
Deepest Fears: A Sociopolitical History of Zombies, from Haiti to the
Walking Dead.” Vox, October 31, 2016. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2016/10/31/13440402/zombie-political-history.
Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard’s Scientist’s Astonishing Journey
into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1985.
Depestre, René. Hadriana in All My Dreams. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover. Brooklyn,
NY: Akashic Books, [1988] 2017.
Glover, Kaiama. “Exploiting the Undead: The Usefulness of the Zombie in Haitian
Literature.” Journal of Haitian Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 105–21.
Guha, Anne, and Nicolas Boring. “Does the Haitian Criminal Code Outlaw Making
Zombies?” In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress. Library of Congress,
October 31, 2014. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/10/does-the-haitian-criminal-
code-outlaw-making-zombies/.
I Walked With a Zombie. [Film] Dir. Jacques Tourneur, Los Angeles: RKO Pictures,
1943.
Khan, Ali S. “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.” Public Health Matters Blog, May
16, 2011. https://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-
zombie-apocalypse/. Accessed May 28, 2020.
Lauro, Sara Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion and Living Death. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Lauro, Sara Juliet, ed. Zombie Theory: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017.
 White and Black Zombies 39

LHS Budget. “Lawrence KS Zombie Walk,” YouTube, October 31, 2012. 1m9seconds-
1m27s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnAS8xp94Ew.
Martin, Kameela L. Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in
American Cinema. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.
Night of the Living Dead. [Film] Dir. George Romero, Pittsburgh, PA: Image Ten, 1968.
Ouanga. [Film] Dir. George Terwilliger, New York: George Terwilliger Productions,
1936.
­Pressley-Sanon, Toni. Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on
Screen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2016.
Saint-Louis, Valerio. “My Interview with Max Beauvoir Part #3: Vodou, Sanpwel,
Bizango, Zombification.” September 18, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=KY5NNfnk8OY.
Seabrook, William. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929.
The Serpent and the Rainbow. [Film] Dir. Wes Craven and Bill Pullman, Los Angeles:
MCA/Universal Pictures, 1988.
Westhoff, Ben. “Doomsday Disciples.” St. Louis Riverfront Times, February 7, 2007.
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/doomsday-disciples/Content?oid=2483838.
For more information, see https://www.zombiehunters.org/forum/.
White Zombie. [Film] Dir. Victor Halperin, Hollywood: United Artists, 1932. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0hL4EBC58.
 ­3

Decolonizing the Zombie: I Walked with a

Zombie’s Critique of Centrist Liberalism
Stephen Shapiro

What does it mean to decolonize the undead? If we seek to disinter the past in
order to liberate ourselves from our own contemporary nightmare, then studies
of Gothic, Horror, and the Weird must be central to any emancipatory endeavor.
For narratives and figurations of the undead are rich with guiding spirits for the
future. Could the zombie be a sentinel, rather than obstacle, for a way forward
out of the past’s rotting matter?
Yet removing the past’s trauma of violence and social inequality is not
simply an act of flipping the switch, of jolting peoples from conditions of
coerced inertia into ones of liberated vitality. No substantive social change
will occur unless it contains a thorough engagement with the structural
conditions that created the catastrophe in the first place. Could a decolonial
approach help us here, and how would that differ from other emancipatory
intentions? Nick Couldry neatly summarizes the distance of a decolonial
approach from prior endeavors. He argues that an earlier “postcolonial
critique” responded to the conditions of historical colonialism by making
a “counter-claim against capitalism, globalism, and neoliberalism in our
times, as it seeks to make evident their colonial roots even if these roots are
partially obscured by contemporary ideologies.”1 Here “postcolonial theories
posit that the foundation of colonial modes of representation is difference”
which is “not merely a passive description, but a form of systemic violence.”2
Tied to this critique is a suggestion that Enlightenment-era knowledge
claims, especially those using “the language of modernity and universal
knowledge, inscribed in historical discourses,”3 were imperialist devices
deploying civilizationist claims to ensure that colonial subjects emulated
their colonizers.
 Decolonizing the Zombie 41

Decoloniality, on the other hand, for Couldry, provides “strategies for surviving
in a neo- or postcolonial context” by looking for “intellectual resources from
beyond the Western canon,” especially ones “inspired by movements from the
Global South.”4 Additionally, while postcolonialism was perceived as sacrificing
economic factors in favor of more cultural ones, decolonial theory understands
“coloniality of power as both an ideological and material phenomenon.”5
We might add to this criticism of postcolonial discourse theory the claim that
it not only marginalized the role of capitalism as a primary driver of modernity
but also that the keyword “Western” was used in as homogenizing fashion as was
“Orientalism,” as the former term both erased conflicts, counter-alliances, and
political alterations within the so-called West and reinstated a mirror image of
civilizationalist claims, wherein the ideal was now located in “the Rest,” rather
than “the West,” as if non-Western nations are exempt from their own capitalist
procedures and historical inequalities.6
Building on Couldry, I want to add a Warwick School perspective that uses
a world-systems knowledge movement as a way of unthinking the categories
of cultural analysis that obstruct a decolonial motivation. From world-systems
analysis, we initially take the claim that a capitalist world-system emerges in the
late fifteenth century and it is one that operates through the creation of social
inequalities (rather than simply social differences) as a way to achieve its drive
for endless accumulation for accumulation’s sake. One feature that distinguishes
a world-system from other materialist approaches on international divisions
of labor is its insistence that capitalism must operate through labor relations
that are weakly proletarianized, often involving poorly, precariously, or frankly
unwaged and coerced labor. Recent arguments regarding racial capitalism and
the persistence of bound labor and necropolitical mastery within capitalism
are ones that fundamentally belong to and help differentiate world-systems
perspectives from other “global” approaches.
For our purposes, it will not immediately be the elements of the world-system
itself that can decolonize the zombie but their use within Immanuel Wallerstein’s
description of centrist liberalism’s secular trend (or long duration). Wallerstein
argued that the interlaced American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, along
with rebellions in Ireland, Egypt, and among the indigenous peoples of South
America, created two self-evident social truths.7 The first was the inevitability of
ongoing social transformation. No longer would it be possible to imagine eternal
or unchanging societies. Tied to this realization was a second truth involving the
shift of power away from the sovereignty of blood aristocracies and the Roman
Catholic Church to forms of democratic or popular rule.8
42 Decolonizing the Undead

Modernity of change and popular rule then gave rise to three metastrategies in
response. Wallerstein calls these metastrategies, ideologies.9 First to appear was
conservatism, exemplified by the writing of Burke and de Maistre. Conservatism
sought to slow down the trajectory of these truths by advancing the notion that
small groups should continue to rule, and these would be the ones associated
with pre-existing elites, like the gentry, according to ideals of family, community,
tradition, established religion, and resistance to transformative legislation. The
third ideology came later during the 1840s and is variously known as radicalism,
socialism, communism, or Marxism. This perspective not only embraced the
new truths but also sought to accelerate their arrival through sudden, mass
discontinuity, that is, revolution.
In between conservatism and radicalism, both chronologically and
positionally, is centrist liberalism. Liberalism accepts the inevitability of change
and democracy, but it seeks to moderate their tempo and regulate their expansion
in order to prevent explosive and disruptive social changes, especially those that
might limit capitalist accumulation. Liberalism sought to ensure this control by
a gradual expansion of voting suffrage, as the means for managing the extension
of representative democracy beyond white, propertied men, and guarding access
to (higher) education, as the apparatus that would credentialize the expertise of
the technocratic and bureaucratic managers who sought to legitimize themselves
as the best rulers of society, ones empowered ostensibly on merit, rather than
blood lineage, cronyism, or popular authority.
While each ideology claimed to be against the post-sovereign state, each
had their own strategy for using it to their own ends. Conservatives sought to
legislate and criminalize threats to their authority. Radicals sought to organize
political action as a way of occupying the state in order to re-engineer or
dismantle it. Liberals theorized; they deployed a set of statist concepts, which
they then gave themselves the task of administering, and they refashioned a
set of institutions as their material barracks and proposed an intertwining set
of binary oppositions as a means of canalizing and controlling popular rule.10
Among these distinctions are the separation between the public and the private,
normal and abnormal, and, above all, citizen subjectivity and those consigned
to social death as exchangeable objects: women, non-whites, proletarians, and
so on. Consequently, liberals’ rhetoric of universalizing equality was a promise
betrayed in practice by their introduction of a new set of social distinctions to
replace older aristocratic and religious ones. As Wallerstein explains:
When inequality was the norm, there was no need to make any further
distinction than that between those of different rank—generically between
 Decolonizing the Zombie 43

noble and commoner. But when equality became the official norm, then it was
suddenly crucial to know who was in fact included in the “all” who have equal
rights—that is, who are the “active” citizens. The more equality was proclaimed
as a moral principle, the more obstacles—juridical, political, economic, and
cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization. The concept, citizen, forced
the crystallization and rigidification—both intellectual and legal—of a long list
of binary distinctions that then came to form the cultural underpinnings of the
capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: bourgeois
and proletarian, man and woman, adult and minor, breadwinner and housewife,
majority and minority, White and Black, European and non-European, educated
and ignorant, skilled and unskilled, specialist and amateur, scientist and layman,
high culture and low culture, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and
abnormal, able-bodied and disabled, and of course the ur-category which all of
these others imply—civilized and barbarian.11

Centrist liberalism’s theories were then institutionalized in two main ways.

First, since formal education was made into a central mechanism for producing
expertise, liberals spent a tremendous amount of effort toward reconstructing
the university for their own ends. The older faculties of law, medicine, theology,
and philosophy were transformed into contained disciplines that were given
control over aspects now considered to be autonomous fields, each with their
own particular methodologies, as a way of verifying truth claims made by
trained experts. So, for instance, economics was given the marketplace; political
science, the state; sociology, the study of the so-called advanced civil societies;
anthropology, the study of “primitive” groups without a large textual record;
and Orientalism, as the study of former world-empires, which did have textual
archives but whose government had fallen into disrepair, such as China, India,
and Egypt.12
One more academic field was constructed that has consequences for this study:
Classics. In the early nineteenth century, spurred on by Romantic celebrations of
Greek Independence efforts against Ottoman Turkey, ancient Greece and Rome
were moved out of the disciplinary category of Orientalism as a way of creating
a white, non-Muslim past that would be taken as the genetic foundation for
Western European civilization’s development into modernity.13 This distinction
was also a feature of competition within the core nation-states of the capitalist
world-system since Germany and Britain devoted particular attention to the
invention of a Greco-Roman classical tradition, as a means of differentiating
themselves from Napoleonic France and its occupying links to Egypt.14 Yet this
tactical deployment involving the separation of “white” Greece and Rome from
44 Decolonizing the Undead

“Black” Egypt was never a clean break or without a paradoxical self-awareness of

its incoherence. The resulting strained awareness of the inconsistencies within
this invented division was compensated by the creation of cultural productions
that might mediate its tensions. One of these “odd” categories is that which we
today call “Gothic” (and Horror and the Weird). It is not accidental that the two
national cultures that largely produced Gothic narratives are the ones that sought
to position themselves in opposition to Napoleonic France’s reopening of the
door to Africa and the Middle East through its invasion of Egypt accompanied
with a host of academic observers. As Gothic-associated cultural productions are
inescapably the terrible child of centrist liberalism’s production of disciplinary
subjects and its creation of modern mythologies about European genesis, they
also became a lens through which we can see the machinery of the capitalist
world-system and its historical conflicts and transformations.
For instance, liberalism’s knowledge formations were aided by their
incorporation of Baconian science and Newtonian concepts of uniform, linear
time and the reproducibility of events, especially as the social sciences were
tasked to produce quasi-empirical, normative “laws” that could simplify social
complexity into knowable laws.15 Claims for the correctness of developmental
predictability seemed believable because centrist liberalism was lucky in its
timing to appear during a long phase of global expansion. As liberalism’s
knowledge claims and theoretical prognostications seemed to be true, centrist
liberalism became so dominant that it forced conservatives and radicals to
accept and adopt many of its claims.16
Throughout the nineteenth century, liberalism managed to endure through
various capitalist crises as it disarmed working-class rebellion through its skilled
management of nationalism, reinforced through its educational structures, and
controlled wealth redistribution through social welfare schemes. European
welfare was largely financed through imperialist carving up the world in renewed
instances of colonial brutality. Here liberalism’s theoretical claims of knowable
processes were turned into civilizational claims that embedded racism and
the “white man’s burden” of sociologizing the anthropological, of making the
colonized mirror the colonizers, and looking to dictate the pace for their gradual
incorporation toward citizenship. Yet when inter-imperialist tensions resulted
in the First World War and ensuing demands for national self-determination,
liberal planning was then turned into a model for the entire globe’s development,
a pathway that recently decolonized nations should follow.17 When postwar
liberalism began to fall into crisis by the 1960s, it had nowhere else to go and
slowly began to recede before neoliberal tactics. It is this decline of liberalism’s
 Decolonizing the Zombie 45

long secular trend, one going back to the late eighteenth century, which has
created a space and context for decoloniality beyond postcoloniality.
In terms of the above, to decolonize does not mean simply insisting on anti-
Eurocentrism. It is not “the West,” or even European-oriented ideas, that ought
to be the target of decolonial critiques. Instead, decolonial criticism should
be directed against centrist liberalism and its deployment of developmental
regulation, linear prediction, and the maintenance of the binary exclusions of
citizen and social death in order to maintain capitalist profiteering. In this sense,
the decolonial project differs from one version of the “postcolonial” one in that
it sees the goal of gaining citizenship privilege by the recently emancipated as
itself a limit. Hence, decolonization is not the pluralism of diversity; it is the
detonation of the theoretical claims of liberalism, especially the ways in which
the personnel of institutional knowledge formations (i.e., the assumed writers
and readers of this collection) consider their evidentiary material as a means
of legitimizing their own social authority, privilege, and status. If intellectual
resources from the Global South are often invoked, this has more to do with
their likelihood of having less liberal centrist content than from any difference
within an itself essentialized notion of the West.
The mandate to decolonize the undead comes then as a means of dissecting
Gothic narratives, broadly conceived, to show their anatomy as a product of
the developmentalist and civilizational split that separated Greco-Roman
“classics” from Afro-Egyptian orientalisms. As discussed below, the figuration
of the zombie endorses centrist liberalism’s conceptual divisions of citizen
and subject of social death, often in ways that still bear the imprint of Anglo-
German competition against France and its colonies. Thus, to decolonize the
zombie means, first, going beyond simple emancipation or independence claims
in order to challenge the method underpinning the citizen-state subjectivity/
social death objectivity split and, second, highlighting the context of conflicts for
hegemony within the capitalist world-system.

Decolonizing Literary and Cultural Studies

If decolonizing literary and cultural studies means unthinking liberalism’s

assumptions, some guidelines are consequential. We must look for regularities
of appearance within a phase’s curation of cultural expression, rather depend on
fictions of transhistorical autonomous lineages. Here we must self-emancipate
from a literary-studies Newtonianism that insists on seeing narrative generic
46 Decolonizing the Undead

figurations as a cultural “tradition” that has an untroubled, linear developmental

passage. Instead, we need to see each cluster of figurations as a curation, a
selection and arrangement of particular elements, some of which are familiar,
albeit obsolete, while others are new due to the onset of emerging historical
events and pressures. Each historical phase foregrounds and disregards specific
figurative elements, often highlighting features that its immediate precursor
moment disregarded. By insisting on a universal or “authentic” meaning of
the zombie and its putative folklore as determining the present, we participate
in centrist liberalism’s recolonizing of cultural elements for its own purposes.
Instead, we need to gain a better sense of why and how cultural figurations
function within their own conjuncture.
For instance, while it has become common today to insist on the context of
Atlantic slavery and rebellion in treatments of the zombie, this focus can often
obscure the actual problem that sparks zombie figuration at different times.18
As Kee says, “Because zombies become intertwined with the ways in which
many people conceive of vodou and Haiti, the tendency to associate zombies
with slavery (and nothing else) ties these three concepts (Haiti, vodou, zombie)
together in a way that is indicative of an overall victimization.”19 Yet throughout
the nineteenth century and well into the mid-twentieth, the primary and
initiating reference for most treatments of the zombie was not slavery in itself,
as a transhistorical feature, but the uncertain status of the Black Republic after
the declaration of Haitian independence. If Atlantic slavery and resistance was,
indeed, the unchanging primary coordinate for zombie curation, then we would
expect these tales to have been simultaneously prevalent throughout continental
North America during this time.
Instead, nearly all the zombie tales in this phase closely link accounts of rural
events within commentary on the various ways in which Haitian self-governance
was perceived to have failed. In reality, the Black Republic’s establishment was
frustrated, not least by the imposition of crushing debt payments by France
as a prerequisite of international recognition of Haitian self-determination.
The period’s zombie curation by Euro-American commentators contemplates
liberalism’s failed mythologies and bad faith claims, by suggesting that
zombification is an apt metaphor for Haiti itself, as no longer a colony, but not yet
an inter-state equal. In these stories, it is the figures of the Black Republic, and not
either colonial slavery or the Revolution, that stand as the narrative touchstones.
Examples of this emphasis include “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” the 1931 story
penned by Canadian Garnett Weston under the pseudonym before he wrote
the script for White Zombie (1932), which is narrated by an old woman, herself
 Decolonizing the Zombie 47

a zombie, who tells a story of incomplete liberation specifically as a result of

Christophe, “Emperor Henry of Haiti[’s]” proximity to a plantation run by a
zombie overseer in lieu of an absent planter.20 Inez Wallace’s short story, “I Walked
with a Zombie,” used as the initial impetus for the later film of that name, begins:
“Haiti, the dark island of mystery, where such incredible figures as Christophe,
the Black Napoleon, rose to world fame as the Negro emperor.”21 Judge Henry
Austin’s “The Worship of the Snake,” a 1912 first-person reportage in The New
England Magazine, which may well have been the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s
description of a vodou-like ceremony in “The Call of Cthulhu,” likewise begins
his essay by directing the reader’s imagination to “the pleasure palace of the mad
negro Christophe.”22 A December 13, 1937, Life magazine article, “Black Haiti:
Where Old Africa and the New World Meet,” cited as a source in the shooting
script for I Walked with a Zombie, balances a sensationalized reproduction of
“the only zombie ever photographed,” an image provided to them by Zora Neal
Hurston, against a realist documentary photospread of a vodou ritual.23 Yet it,
too, begins by speaking of “Christophe, black king of Haiti,” who “was born a
slave and his driving fury in life was to make his people respected . . . Today,
as in the day of Christophe, the Negros of Haiti have no love of superimposed
Western grandeur. They prefer the intricate, if primitive, culture that is their
own.” That Christophe, rather than L’Ouverture or Dessalines, is the familiar
touchstone suggests that nonfilmic Anglophone zombie figurations before the
Second World War highlight the Haitian Republic’s challenge to models of linear
nation-state development, more than standing as a reminder of Atlantic slavery
or the Revolution’s rebellion.
Furthermore, the complicated tripartite grouping of white creoles, the
Black enslaved, and the mixed-race “free people of color” confuse the binary
logics of nineteenth-century racial categories. For example, Austin conveys
that zombification is not emancipation, but a competitive ruse to gain coerced
labor from white slavers. The “trance-producing poison” was a device to steal
the enslaved “because slaves, as valuable chattel, were carefully enumerated
and a search would be instituted by the masters if a negro disappeared.”24
Consequently, a poison simulating death allowed for the enslaved to be buried
in order for later exhumation. But this rising up did not result in emancipation.
Instead it simply transferred the subject from being in bondage to a white master
to being in bondage to a non-white one. In this sense, zombie curation before
the mid-twentieth century locates a crisis of frustrated liberation, a failure of
state equality, and liberalism’s broken promise about the gradual expansion of
suffrage and education’s conscious-raising.
48 Decolonizing the Undead

The first cluster of Hollywood films, from White Zombie (1932) to I Walked
with a Zombie (1943), is substantively different from prior curations as they
clearly select and disregard earlier elements in immediately noticeable ways.
First, the Hollywood films distance themselves entirely from any historical
recollection of the Republic and are as much influenced by Jane Eyre and
Dracula (and their own filmic adaptions) as they are by African-transplanted
rituals. Even in pre-code Hollywood, and its greater comfort in displaying the
outrageous, the films are silent on the topics that appear in nearly every prior
Anglophone discussion of vodou: human sacrifice (“the goat without horns”)
and cannibalism. Moreover, the films even abjure any mention of animal
sacrifice or the use of snakes as a fetish for the spirits.
Second, the Hollywood films entirely silence the role of Haiti’s
disempowerment within the capitalist world-system as these films exclude the
prior accounts’ standard element of narrating the white narrator’s encounter
with Haitian political and social elites. For Hollywood, Haiti and its imagined
surrogates are places without any kind of national government. This amnesia is
intentional, since even William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) continually
embeds his sensationalism with accounts of American military-backed capitalist
interests in occupied Haiti. Austin’s preceding essay piece for The New England
Magazine focuses on President François Antoine Simon’s government and ends
with Simon telling Austin, “My policy is to encourage American capital.”25
Rather than approach zombies from the perspective of the de facto
zombification of the Haitian State by imperial interests, the pre–Second World
War American cinema often uses the zombie to stage performances of gendered
sexual violence as a way of raising concerns about the period’s nascent feminism
that may disrupt codes of racial segregation. The traffic in zombified women
encodes a concern about “passing” (in both directions) across the color line
in ways that social authorities cannot control. The 1936 film Ouanga situates
zombie making as the result of a light-skinned plantation owner’s anger at being
refused by a white plantation owner, Adam Maynard (Philip Brandon), as a
suitable wife. On board a ship returning from New York, where Klili Gordon
(Fredi Washington) has presumably been passing as white, she is told by
Maynard that he cannot marry her, since “you belong with your kind.” Back
on the island, Maynard’s Black overseer Lestrange then courts Klili, justifying
this advance because he notes that Maynard’s new wife is “white.” Klili replies,
“I’m white, too, as white as she is.” After insistently showing her face, hands, and
chest to Lestrange (and the viewer), she asks if they look Black. Lestrange replies,
“Your white skin doesn’t change what is inside you—you’re Black. You belong to
 Decolonizing the Zombie 49

us. You belong to me.” Lestrange, played by Jewish American Sheldon Leonard
in a filmic act of passing, then forcefully grabs and kisses her. The ensuing plot
involves Klili’s response to her racial dismissal and gendered body’s inequality by
zombifying Maynard’s wife in an act of revenge.
The context of American domestic racism sets the grounds for a counterpoint.
In the same year as Ouanga, two Black American female anthropologists traveled
to Haiti on fellowships to pursue ethnographic accounts of vodou, both of which
include a discussion of zombies: Zora Neal Hurston, who would publish her
accounts of oral folklore as Tell My Horse (1938), and Katherine Dunham, whose
research would not find publication until her memoir, Island Possessed (1969).
Both accounts break from Hollywood’s concerns as they seek, to varying effect,
to revalue the African cultural legacy without sublimating it to the normative
embodied forms of white America.
While Hurston’s now well-known writing has been criticized for insufficiently
challenging her white readership, Dunham’s work uses zombie citation as a
means of foregrounding historical complexity and cultural variegation. Both
a classically trained dancer and academic student of anthropologist Melville J.
Herskovits, who provided Dunham with letters of introduction gained from his
own field research that led to Life in a Haitian Valley (1937) and the two-volume
Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938), Dunham would combine
her awareness of dance and training in field-participant research to study African
cultural pathways in the New World through kinetic performances.
Dunham’s Haitian research would find its first public presentation, however,
not in print form, but through the staging of African-influenced dance, in movies
like Stormy Weather (1943) and Dunham’s own choreographed theater pieces,
like L’ Ag’ Ya (1938), a tale of a love triangle that includes a sequence involving
a visit to the Zombie King. In this zombie curation, Dunham seeks to make a
claim for American culture as noteworthy for its cultural heterogeneity, much as
had Du Bois early in his career. The anthropological model that Dunham was
trained within depended on a declension model of cultural transmission and
loss, wherein African tribal practice becomes folklore in the ruralized Caribbean
and then secularized in America, where urbanized Black populations maintain
formal elements of movement, but have little sense of the initial spiritual context
for African dance. In this, Dunham follows Herskovits’ lifelong scholarly project
that argued for continuities of African culture in the New World and against
the notion that the enslaved were entirely voided of cultural memory by the
Middle Passage and ensuing conditions of enslavement. In the larger context,
the cultural pathways argument resists the mid-century’s notion of pluralist
50 Decolonizing the Undead

consensus, which claimed the United States as a “melting pot,” wherein all prior
(European and African) ethnic allegiances would melt into a monoculture.
Dunham’s and Herskovits’ research is positioned against liberal
developmentalism, especially as Dunham’s choreography from the 1930s
argues for the value of combined and unevenness within the United States. In
an account of the politics driving these pieces, Dunham argues that Caribbean
immigration to the United States “has given African tradition a place in a large
cultural body which it enjoys nowhere else,” even if the originating logic of the
dances is weakly held. For while African culture changes more in the United
States than elsewhere, these alterations are to be celebrated as creating a “sound
functional relationship towards a culture which is contemporary . . . The curious
fact is that it will be the American Negro, in his relatively strong position as part
of American culture, who, in the final analysis, will most probably guarantee the
persistence of African dance traditions.”26
Yet Dunham’s performances of vodou dance for white Northern audiences are
less concerned with questions of authenticity, since the staging involves Broadway-
stylization of different African and Caribbean eurythmics; passing, as the erasure
of difference; or even “cultural appropriation,” than as a gesture embracing the
articulation of differences within a complex whole. In formal terms, this ideal
was achieved through the “Dunham technique,” wherein each body part moves
simultaneously and independently of one another, while creating an overarching
physical gestalt. Just as African dance flourishes in an otherwise white dominant
America, Dunham’s own dance zombie figurations are not bound to an idealized
territorial origin or unchanging folklore. Instead, the zombie in Dunham’s hands
makes sense only within its own historical conjuncture and location within
the American metropole where the zombie stands as an exemplary figure that
is both-and-neither of white America and Black Africa. While contemporary
zombie figurations often seem unaware of their predecessors within Haiti, for
Dunham, this does little to diminish their value.
By the late 1960s writing of Island Possessed, Dunham’s cultural viewpoints
have aligned more with the period’s rise of political negritude and Black Power.
The title of Island Possessed conveys three of the book’s main themes: the legacy
of the recently ended military occupation of Haiti by the Americans; the vodou
culture of loa or spirit-god possession that pervades Haiti, especially in its rural
regions; and, finally, the absence of sexual violence for a young, single Black
American female, often traveling alone for late-night rituals, as if to counter
Hollywood’s obsessions with the targeted female body. Dunham argues, perhaps
overly idealistically, that while Haiti has a long history of revolutionary upheaval,
 Decolonizing the Zombie 51

it had little interpersonal violence or abuse of children before Pap Doc Duvalier
and the rise of the Tonton Macoutes.
Dunham’s dance anthropology inescapably led to her hearing accounts
about zombies, about which she says there are two kinds. The first is of a “truly
dead person who by the intervention of black magic has been brought back to
life.” To prevent this transformation, some family members keep watch over
the recently deceased until the corpse disintegrates, while others “hammer a
long iron nail into the forehead of a dead person so that all bodily functions
are interrupted beyond revival,” a feature that Romero seems to have recovered
and reinserted into his own filmic curation of zombies.27 The other kind of
zombie is a person who is given a potion of herbs that simulates death in ways
that allows them to be buried and later excavated, “not for evil deeds generally,
but . . . serviceable work of tilling and cultivating fields.” For the former, salt-
eating results in disintegration, while for the latter, it acts as an antidote to the
incapacitating poison.28
Hearing of a Bokor who makes zombies, mainly as a device to keep several
women as compliant wives, Dunham travels to Leogane for a visit. In this account
she presents a relatively different view of the cultural entanglements that have
given rise to the island’s zombielore. While Haiti is known for its nonbinary
race-caste system involving the larger categories of whites, Blacks, and mulattos,
Dunham suggests that even within the Black community there remain long-
standing differences among those who are descended from Africans coming
from Dahomey (present-day Benin), the Congo, and present-day Nigeria. While
vodou rituals are ones from Dahomey and are associated with the Rada Iwa loa,
the tales of zombification and cannibalism are features ascribed to Congo rituals
involving the Petwo Iwa loa. Dunham’s distinction may be supported by the
common etymological citation of “zombie” as coming from zumbi and nzambi
in Kikongo language, rather than the Fon spoken by those from Dahomey, and
that a slave revolt in late seventeenth-century Brazil was led by Nganga Zumbi/
Ganga Zumba, who claimed Kongo descent.
Dunham’s purpose in relating the encounter seems to speak to the larger
project of the memoir, written after Dunham had moved to Senegal. For while
African religion becomes synthetic in the New World, where Dahomey rituals
and iconography have fused with Catholic ones, Dunham suggests that there is
little intermixture between different African pantheons, either in Africa or in
the New World. Hence the contact and tensions between Congo and Dahomey
contingents over social hierarchy within the Black Haitian community may
be generating the circulation of zombie tales. In her account of the visit to
52 Decolonizing the Undead

the Congo Bokor, Dunham unexpectedly flees the scene after being invited
to participate in an initiation ritual. The reader is left to intuit that Dunham
feared the onset of sexual violence that the memoir otherwise claims is absent
in Haiti. In this sense, Island Possessed uses zombie curation less as a means of
addressing white readers’ fears or fantasies, or even to defend the contribution
of Black Americans in the nation’s patchwork, than to consider what might be
the obstacles to a pan-Africanism conceptualized outside a narrowly defined
national liberation movement. The zombie stands as an object question about
what tensions exist that prevent the creation of a culture of the Global South and
what pan-Africanism might look like outside the scarring legacy of the artificial
national boundaries created by former imperial powers. It is within this space
between Dunham’s 1930s cultural front politics about American heterogeneity
and a 1960s concern for a Black (BIPOC) International that one of Hollywood’s
most decolonial films appears, I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Decolonizing the Cinema: I Walked with a Zombie

The RKO studio film, I Walked with a Zombie (1943), exemplifies one means of
decolonizing the zombie by challenging liberal assumptions. This film belongs
to a sequence of Val Lewton-produced and Jacques Tourneur-directed films,
mainly shot either in the immediate months before the United States’ formal
entry into the Second World War or immediately afterward: Cat People (1942),
I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). These films share
a similar structure as they present the encounter of three different knowledge
formations: one by exotic/ethnic/indigenous peoples (Catholic Serbians/
Caribbean Blacks/New Mexican Latinx and Native Americans); the viewpoint
of the assumed viewer, a white, Protestant American; and the expertise of a
seemingly liberal figure of academic or professional knowledge. Each film
begins with a “regular” white American (Oliver Reed in Cat People calls
himself a “[normal] good, plain Americano”) who has a naïve or incredulous
encounter with a subaltern or foreign figure marked by a traumatic history
of grieving, domination, and continued exclusion or marginalization from
contemporary society.
Presented with an inexplicable event of horror, the normative character (and
viewer) looks to the superiority of white professional authorities for explanation
and social repair. In each film, however, these figures of epistemological
authority are revealed to be not only simply wrong but, moreover, the source
 Decolonizing the Zombie 53

of evil itself. In Cat People, the posh English-accented psychiatrist activates

his Serbian patient’s were-shifting with a lecherous kiss that is symbolically
visualized as rape, as he had previously displayed the sword-cane used to stab
and kill her by violently thrusting it in and out of its sheath. In The Leopard
Man, the tweedy East Coast former professor and now ethnographic museum
curator is revealed to be the serial murderer of ethnic women. In I Walked with
a Zombie, the female physician, the widow of a missionary before her marriage
to the plantation owner, claims that she alone is responsible for turning her
adulterous daughter-in-law into a zombie. In all three films, the explanations
by the exotics or subalterns who speak English with accents are revealed to be
either true or more worthy of consideration than that of the morally depraved,
but high status, white figure of knowledge and expertise.
The typical American’s ultimate realization that they failed to protect others
due to their own willingness to be led by familiar authorities also leaves them
traumatized, based on a combination of the shattering of their faith in authority
and recognition that this faith left them passive and thus also complicit in the
enactment of evil. In each film, “horror” is used to disrupt the placid surface that
disfigures unquestioned (racial) privilege. Taken as a unit, it is hard not to see
these films by the Jewish Russian émigré Lewton and the French-born Tourneur
as constituting a message to its audience, the “plain Americanos,” that something
quite bad is happening to exotic Europeans in the 1940s. While these foreigners
seem odd, their (Jewish) suffering needs to be taken seriously, especially if
domestic, liberal white elites do nothing.
While each of these films enacts the passage from incredulity to guilt, I Walked
with a Zombie most thoroughly achieves its decolonial purpose of delegitimizing
liberal knowledge, as it asks its audience not only to question white authority but
to interrogate their own forms of cultural consumption and the ways in which
the “zombie” of dulled sensation is not the Black Caribbean but themselves,
the audience that may sit inert in the face of social catastrophe in the world
beyond the cinema. The movie begins with a naïve Canadian nurse, Betsy, who
is contracted to aide Jessica, an oddly affectless wife of a plantation owner on
St. Sebastian, a fictional Caribbean island. While Betsy repeatedly fantasizes
about the island, and its possibilities for her own romantic awakening with the
plantation owner, she is repeatedly told, to no effect, about its foundation in
slavery. The continuing presence of slavery’s trauma is materially foregrounded,
for instance, in the plantation owner’s courtyard with a St. Sebastian-like statue
that was the figurehead of the ship said to have brought over the initial slaves
for the canefields. The lines between Betsy’s erotic yearning and the Black
54 Decolonizing the Undead

community’s burden of slavery’s wake cross paths when she takes Jessica to the
island’s vodou houmfort (or temple) for help in her patient’s recovery.
Told by Black female servants how to arrive and move beyond a guarding
zombie, Carrefour (Darby Jones), by wearing a pass token, Betsy guides Jessica
through the canebrake, losing the pinned token (albeit to no real effect), before
coming to a stylized performance of a sabre dance in a vodou ritual. As people
line up to speak to the presumed Houngan into a hole through the temple’s
closed door, Betsy joins the queue. When she speaks to the opening, the door
unexpectedly opens, and Betsy is pulled inside. There she sees Mrs. Rand,
the physician mother to the plantation owner, who explains that she has been
ventriloquizing vodou rituals to more successfully dispense Western medical
advice to the island’s Black population. While Betsy is talking to Rand, the
sabre dancer pierces Jessica and, after seeing no blood or pain reflex, exclaims,
“zombie.” Hearing the commotion, Rand tells Betsy to take Jessica quickly back
to the plantation. When the local authorities later investigate the presence of a
white zombie, Rand confesses that she believes she is responsible for zombifying
Jessica to prevent her from leaving one of Rand’s sons for the other. While the
film shows the sabre dancer later using a doll to pull Jessica to the houmfort,
aided by Carrefour, it ends with Jessica’s white lover taking her into the sea for
what appears to be a murder-suicide. Although the shooting script concludes
with a final scene in Montreal with Betsy now married to the widowed planter,
the actual film ends on a downbeat and depressed voiceover that offers no happy
end for the viewers.29
The film’s choreographed vodou ritual makes it appear exotic, but the scene
is not sensationalized. Lewton and Tourney researched vodou seriously from
the sources available to them (the shooting script begins with the claim that it
is “based on scientific information from articles”) and hired Leroy Antoine, an
editor of Haitian and vodou songs, as an advisor due to his own awareness and
publication about vodou practice and music.30 Indeed, vodou and zombification
is calmly acknowledged as an unexceptional part of the contemporary fabric
of Caribbean society. When the Rada drumming is first heard, it is explained
to Betsy as “Saint Sebastian’s version of the factory whistle,” a means of calling
workers to the cane mill. When Betsy appears with Jessica at the houmfort,
the ceremony’s participants barely notice their presence and make no effort to
prevent their viewing. The threat in the film is not ultimately Carrefour, whose
role is to protect the houmfort, but that someone else has created the Jessica
zombie, and for what ends? While the film evades the history of Haiti by setting
its action on a fictitious island, where no record of past Black rebellion exists,
 Decolonizing the Zombie 55

it does elliptically implicate American militarized capitalism, as Mrs. Rand’s

name indicates the link between rule and knowledge. While the military-serving
RAND corporation would not be created until after the Second World War, its
abbreviation, “research and development,” was already a prewar commonplace
as the name for corporate scientific planning units.
I Walked with a Zombie’s achievement lies not simply in its acknowledgment
of African religion’s dignity, the history of slavery, and the duplicity of white
liberals but in its meta-reflexive intervention to its viewers about their own
consumption. For the canebreak and houmfort sequence visualizes the act of
going to a cinema itself, with Carrefour made to stand like a ticket-taker, Rand’s
dress suit (inappropriate for Caribbean heat) like that of a clichéd movie director,
the door with a hole looks like a film apparatus with a director watching action
through a seeing optic, and the sabre dancer literally ends the scene with a “cut”
accompanied by a one-word exclamation.
Lewton uses horror not merely as a device to give visual recognition to the
peoples who are often made to stand as mute icons of their own suffering but as
a medium for the viewer to question their own mode of observation.31 I Walked
with a Zombie uses zombie curation both as a suggestive device about the looming
Nazi threat and also as a way of encouraging the viewer to reflect on their own
act of film-watching, especially the ethnographic newsreels that often prefaced
the regular movie offering, and to decolonize their own minds by questioning
the liberal expertise that they have taken for granted as commonsense. In this
sense, a decolonial culture may free both the living and the undead from centrist
liberalism’s nightmare.

Notes

1 Couldry, The Costs of Connection, 76.

2 Couldry, The Costs of Connection, 76.
3 Couldry, The Costs of Connection, 78.
4 Couldry, The Costs of Connection, 80.
5 Couldry, The Costs of Connection, 81.
6 Lazarus, “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory,” 43–64.
7 Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 126–44. See also Wallerstein, The Global Left and The
Modern World-System IV.
8 Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 130.
9 Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 72–93 and Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV,
1–19.
56 Decolonizing the Undead

10 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 15–16, 153, 168, 219–73.

11 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 146.
12 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 219–73.
13 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 55–6.
14 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 55–8, 267–9.
15 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 7.
16 Wallerstein, After Liberalism, 72–93.
17 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV, 252–71.
18 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 7, 50.
19 Kee, Not Your Average Zombie, 6.
20 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 14 (39–53).
21 Wallace, “I Walked with a Zombie,” 95 (95–102).
22 Austin, “The Worship of the Snake,” 170 (170–82).
23 Anon., “Black Haiti,” 27 (27–31).
24 Austin, “Worship of the Snake,” 174–5.
25 Austin, The New England Magazine, 5–6.
26 Dunham, “The Negro Dance,” 225 (217–22).
27 Dunham, Island Possessed, 184.
28 Dunham, Island Possessed, 185.
29 Siodmak and Wray, Shooting Script for I Walked with a Zombie.
30 Siodmak and Wray, Shooting Script for I Walked with a Zombie; Bowman and Leroy,
The Voice of Haiti.
31 Nemerov, Icons of Grief.

Work Cited

Austin, Henry. The New England Magazine, July–August (1911): 5–6.

Austin, Henry. “The Worship of the Snake.” The New England Magazine, June (1912):
170–82.
“Black Haiti: Where Old Africa and the New World Meet.” Life 3:24 (December 13,
1937): 27–31.
Bowman, Laura, and Antoine Leroy. The Voice of Haiti: An Unusual Collection of
Original Native Ceremonial Songs, Invocations, Voodoo Chants, Drum Beats and
Rhythms, Stories of Traditions, etc., of the Haitian People. New York: Clarence
Williams Music Publishing, 1938.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human
Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Dunham, Katherine. Island Possessed. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1969.
Dunham, Katherine. “The Negro Dance” (excerpt). In Kaiso!: Writings by and about
Katherine Dunham, edited by Verve A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson, 217–22. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
 Decolonizing the Zombie 57

Haining, Peter. Zombie! Stories of the Walking Dead. London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1985.
Hutter, Garnett Weston. “Salt Is Not for Slaves.” In Zombie! Stories of the Walking Dead,
edited by Peter Haining, 39–53. London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1985.
Kee, Chera. Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to
Zombie Walks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death.
Camden: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Lazarus, Neil. “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory.” In Marxism, Modernity
and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, 43–64.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Nemerov, Alexander. Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
Siodmak, Curt, and Ardel Wray. Shooting Script for I Walked with a Zombie, 1943.
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/i-walked_with_a_zombie.html.
Wallace, Inez. “I Walked with a Zombie.” In Zombie! Stories of the Walking Dead, edited
by Peter Haining, 95–102. London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1985.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Global Left: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. London:
Routledge, 2022.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant,
1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
58
 ­Part Two

Zombie World-System
60
 ­4

Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past

Frank Jacob

The samurai is probably one of the most well-known Japanese icons and a figure of
self-identification for cinema audiences in the East Asian country.1 Traditionally,
Japanese films are divided into two genres: jidaigeki, epic films that deal with
the past and especially the samurai,2 and gendaigeki, films that deal with current
events or questions related to identity or society.3 Consequently, films about the
warrior class of Japan’s past have historically always had a prominent place on
the screen. Nevertheless, other genres, including Japanese horror films, have also
become quite popular in recent years and even inspired Western remakes like
Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), similar to the classics by Kurosawa Akira4 that
inspired John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful
of Dollars (1964).5 In the booming zombie film genre in Japan,6 elements like the
samurai were blended in and thereby represent a symbiosis of historical and zombie
identities. Such films could be again divided into zombie comedy, like Samurai of
the Dead (Shinsengumi obu za deddo, 2015) or splatter films, although often also
comic, like Samurai Zombie: Headhunter From Hell (Yoroi: Samurai Zombie, 2008).
After a section with an initial discussion of the samurai as a Japanese symbol
that in itself seems to be immortal and the cultural context of the zombie in
Japan, the present chapter will discuss how far Yoroi: Samurai Zombie is not just
a Japanese zombie film but an exaggeration of an obsession with the past that
is represented as something that haunts people even today and leads to some
kind of deadly struggle. The zombie identity here would then be mixed with a
historical samurai identity, and I would suggest that the symbiosis of samurai and
zombie could be understood as emblematic of the struggle for Japan’s identity,
a country that is considered modern in a Western sense but often seems to be
controlled, even haunted, by traditions that go way back in time. The samurai
zombie would therefore be a semiotic construction for Japan’s undead past.
62 Decolonizing the Undead

Samurai, Zombies, and a Country between

Tradition and Modernity

Considering how long the samurai ruled Japan as a warrior elite—from the
twelfth to the nineteenth century, tightening their political rule even further
after Tokugawa Ieyasu unified the country again after the Battle of Sekigahara
in 1600 and a long period of internal wars—it is not surprising that many films
dealing with Japan’s history would focus on one or other aspect of this centuries-
long history.7 Ironically, the samurai and their warrior code (bushidō) became
particularly famous when Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933) published his book about
the “soul of Japan” in 1900.8 At this point, the samurai as a ruling class had already
vanished and the country had been forced through a modernization process—
the Meiji Restoration9—due to which society had changed tremendously, while
the Japanese leadership intended to combine Western knowledge with Japanese
traditions (wakon yōsai).10 Some intellectuals of this first modern period in
Japan’s history, the Meiji period (1868–1912), like Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–
1901), began to discuss the question of Japan’s identity more intensively and
whether it should be considered an Asian country at all.11 The politicians were
first and foremost interested in a strong nation-state that was economically and
militarily strong (fukoku kyōhei) as they wanted to avoid becoming a colonial or
semi-colonial country like China.12
Western imperialism was considered dangerous for the sovereignty of the
Japanese state, yet nationalist elements in Japan also argued that modernization
according to Western standards would sacrifice traditional values. These
nationalists, often organized in small secret societies, depicted themselves as
patriots (shishi) and the heirs of the samurai.13 They tried to force the government
into a more aggressive foreign policy to continue or fulfill Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s
(1537–98) dream of a Greater East Asian Empire under Japanese leadership.14
The samurai spirit, so to speak, haunted Japan during its modern period as well,
when national conservative forces regularly reminded the country of its past.15
The samurai remained undead, and there were some spectacular suicides, like
those of Nogi Maresuke, a famous general of the Russo-Japanese War who killed
himself in 1912 after the death of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito (1852–1912),16
and the famous author Mishima Yukio (1925–70), who protested against Japan’s
Westernization after a failed coup d’etat with his ritual suicide.17 The samurai
and their spirit consequently seemed to be “undead,” reminding Japan of a past
the country seemed to have left behind.
 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past 63

In particular, after 1945 and Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, the American
occupation, and a forced process of democratization,18 the samurai spirit was
considered to have been responsible for the nation’s expansive foreign policy
and the destruction of large parts of Asia, as well as their final suffering from the
atomic bombs. While avant-garde artists and filmmakers were pointing to this
relationship between destruction and a form of authoritarianism,19 often falsely
simply referred to as Japanese fascism, the government of Japan and a majority
of the population had no interest in remembering the past and rather turned to
highlight its importance for the US security system in the early Cold War in Asia
and began to rebuild the economy of the East Asian country, which would soon
begin to play an economically leading role again. Yet the samurai seemed to have
become immortal and remained not only a historical but often also a spiritual or
cultural point of reference.
Although it took until the late 1970s for the first zombie films, like George
A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), to reach Japanese shores,20 there was
already a visual culture in place that dealt with different kinds of horror stories,
often about ghosts, a genre of stories already quite popular in the Edo period
(1603–1868) and illustrated in many woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) of the time.21
There were also yōkai, supernatural spirits or monsters, stories about which
were an essential part of Japanese folklore.22 It was therefore not surprising that
zombie stories, be they shown on the big screen or told in probably the most
popular media form in Japan, manga, became quite popular.23 The zombie genre
is broad in Japan, as there are low-budget productions that often gain cult status
within the zombie-loving community, such as the latest low-budget hit Kamera
o Tomeru na! (2017), a variety of zombie manga for all kinds of readers,24 and
foreign imports like the Resident Evil (2002–16) series starring Milla Jovovich and
representing a kind of international zombie renaissance since the early 2000s.25
It must be considered that the “first zombie film,” White Zombie (1932),26 had
more to offer than just horror; according to Japanese scholar Fukuda Asako, in
fact, it offered a deeper contextualization of its time, that is, Western societies in
the 1930s, and contemporary problems.27 The popularity of zombies in the late
third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century must
consequently be related to more than the effects of cheap splatter productions
in which the “running zombie”28 replaced older and visually less violent versions
of the undead.
Zombies present an ambiguity.29 They are human-like, as they were human in
the past, but at the same time, they are undead, although no longer alive either.
64 Decolonizing the Undead

And, of course, they pose a threat to human beings, who could turn into zombies
easily. Considering the history of Japan, however, there is an ambivalent way to
interpret the “undead” past. When we take a look at the historical roots of the
zombie, namely slavery in the French colony of St. Domingue and their liberation
during the Haitian Revolution,30 the interrelationship between “zombieness”
and space-time-continuum of their genesis becomes obvious. American scholar
Sarah J. Lauro, in her book The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and
Living Death (2015), highlighted that “[i]n contemporary accounts of the Haitian
Revolution, the ferocity of the rebels was denigrated: they were less than men;
they were animals or machines run amok. This is the transformation by which
the dehumanized slave becomes the inhuman rebel.”31
Consequently, and in its Haitian context, “the zombie is not a figure of
resurrection but only of living death, and insofar as the zombie metaphorizes
both slavery and slave rebellion . . ., its ability to represent not merely enslavement,
but liberation from that state, is tempered by its irresolvable dialecticality.”32 It is
important, for the Japanese context, to understand this diversity of the zombie
image. While in the Haitian context, as Lauro clearly explained and analyzed,
“the figure of the zombie clearly represents one or the other: the history of a
people’s enslavement or that of their fierce resistance to oppression,”33 there are
multiple perspectives of the zombie image in Japan as well. On the one hand, it
can represent an undead past of Japan’s history, that is, the history of the samurai
and their fall due to the social changes in accordance with Japan’s modernization
since the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin) in 1868.34 While the
samurai class had been abolished, the samurai spirit, as expressed by Nitobe
Inazō and others, continued to in a way haunt Japan and the extremist forces
would gain more influence since the end of the Taishō period (1912–26) and
lead the country toward an aggressive foreign policy. Regardless of the intent
of many Japanese, to simply forget about these past events, the samurai, as a
symbolic resemblance, dead and yet undead like a zombie, seems to remain an
aspect of popular culture in particular.
There has, however, from a more global perspective, recently been a reverse
with regard to the zombie image related to TV series like iZombie (2015–19),35
but even if comedies seem to be particularly en vogue today, for example,
Zombieland (2009) and Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), the threat of the zombie
remains. Nevertheless, especially in Japan, the threatening zombie image
appears to be more than imagined, considering the mass of the zombie-like
workforce who are obliged to function according to social expectations. Sleeping
salarymen and businesswomen,36 without control over their human well-being,
 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past 65

populate the subways of the Japanese metropolis as the “living dead” every
day, exhausted, almost no longer conscient, zombie-like. Japan consequently
provides multiple possibilities to understand the zombie: a long gone past that is
nevertheless essential for the perception of Japan, and a present business model
that demands dehumanization from its workforce and the negation of any kind
of work-life balance.
At the same time, there is a strong interest in seeing zombies breaking down
existent orders in splatter comedies when the zombie element becomes the
one that rules and often simply destroys the daily routine by turning people
who appear to be like zombies into real ones. It is not the intent of the present
chapter to provide the ultimate answer to the question of why zombie stories
are so popular in Japan, however, especially since it seems to be a mix of all
these factors: visual and narrative traditions that reach back to the Edo period,
a positive identification with a zombie apocalypse that destroys the exploitative
work system of the world, or at least some traceability of a zombie identity in
the personal lives of so many Japanese, forced into social conventions.37 In the
following discussion of Yoroi: Samurai Zombie, I will try to emphasize some of
these aspects with regard to the film, which is one example of Japanese splatter
films that deal with the zombie, but which also combines its story with the
samurai, as it is a samurai zombie that returns from the dead to demand blood.

Yoroi: Samurai Zombie (2008)

The plot of the film, directed by Sakaguchi Tak and written by Kitamura
Ryūhei,38 which received relatively positive reactions from the critics after being
shown at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in South Korea,39
is relatively simple and easily explained. The film was advertised on film blogs
as “providing fresh ground meat” for Japan’s horror genre.40 It is a true splatter
highlight, although comic as well, in which a kidnapped family, two criminals,
and a samurai zombie get to meet each other, an incident that would not remain
bloodless. It is a “low-budget massacre,” including flying body parts and liters of
film blood. A family—Shigeo (Fukikoshi Mitsuru), Yasuko (Oginome Keiko),
Asami (Nakajima Airi), and Ryota (Sakurazuka Yakkun)—is on their way to
vacation but is taken hostage by two criminals, namely the couple Aihara (Ishida
Issei) and Jirō (Ueda Hiromi), who force the family to drive them.
When the car has to stop because of a blown tire, Shigeo is sent away to
get help. He wanders through the landscape until he reaches an old cemetery,
66 Decolonizing the Undead

where he starts to dig in the ground until he finds an old sword, with which he
decapitates himself. Due to this act and the blood on the ground, which reaches
an old tomb, the samurai zombie is awakened and begins to hunt the remaining
family members as well as the two kidnappers. The final battle between the
zombies, led by the undead samurai, and the humans begins in a ghost town.
Rather than spoil the film for the reader too much at this point, I will discuss
some of its elements here instead of shedding too much light on the plot.
The low-budget production provides colorful criminals who remind
the audience of cosplayers rather than actual criminals, a trend that can be
observed in other genres, where the bad guys are often presented as exaggerated
caricatures as well. At the same time, elements related to traditional Japanese
ghost stories can be identified, as Shigeo’s suicide seems to act as a trigger for
the arrival of the zombies. The death of a human being releases the undead. And
these resemble both a past that has long gone and, at the same time, the struggle
between modernity and tradition, between Japanese and Western values. This
is comically represented by the battle between Aihara and the samurai zombie,
one using a gun, the other a sword. This motif reminds the cineast of Kurosawa’s
Yojimbo (1961), where the bodyguard also has to face the bad guy in an unequal
battle of sword against pistol in the end, or—on a broader scale—even of The
Last Samurai (2003) and the heroic battle of the samurai against a modernized
army, a romantic mise en scène that is historically inaccurate.
The samurai themselves seem to haunt the family and the two criminals
for no specific reason, simply considering them to be intruders. Their anger
consequently reflects Japanese anger against Western intrusion, a form of cultural
colonialism, which the historical samurai must have felt between the opening of
Japan in 1853 and the end of the rebellions against the new state in 1877, when
the Satsuma Rebellion under the leadership of Saigō Takamori was violently
suppressed by the new conscript army. In a way, one could argue that Japan is
still struggling with regard to its identity. While politicians like Abe Shinzō, who
recently resigned but has paved the way for a more nationalist tone of Japanese
politics, support a more nationalist course, highlighting particularly Japanese
values, others argue for a further and maybe second “opening” of the country
due to its demographic problems. The idea that Japan is consequently haunted
by its own past is something that seems to be an obvious aspect of the film.
The fight between the humans and the zombies is consequently a resemblance
of the conflict humans have to face with their past, their cultural identity, and
the social expectations that determine their fate, at least to some extent, even in
modern-day Japan. The zombie is therefore an essential part of the human, in
 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past 67

this case the Japanese self, one that is often forgotten, but one that will also never
be fully dead.
Besides this subconscious aspect, the “samurai headhunter” that is presented
in Yoroi: Samurai Zombie is also a caricature of the Japanese samurai, a loyal
subordinate whose life was and still seems to be determined by his identity. Just
as the early modern warrior could not escape his life and even had to commit
suicide to honor his superior, the zombie identity seems to be related to a curse:
not being able to fully die. Considering the Buddhist ideas that were particularly
strengthened during the Tokugawa period, the samurai could consequently
not fulfill his legacy and pass on but remained dead, yet not dead enough. This
aspect also points to the fact that while the samurai disappeared physically in late
nineteenth-century Japan, their spirit with regard to honor and war still seems
to haunt the island nation in the twenty-first century, when ultra-right-wing
societies demand a national strength that would continue Hideyoshi’s ambition
for an Asian Empire.
That especially the experience of Japan’s expansionist ambitions can lead to
a different, as mentioned above, a second, interpretation of the image of the
samurai in relation to Japan’s aggressive foreign policy since the late sixteenth
century can be observed in other Asian countries, where the historical victim
experience of a colonial or later imperialist invasion created a different image of
the zombie. Usually the colonizers “get marked as the first world”41 and therefore
intend to destroy the existent political and social order or at least change it to
fit the needs of the imperial center. Such a historical experience, as it was, for
example, created by Hideyoshi’s expansion to Korea, and the latter’s annexation
by Japan in 1910, leading Japanese settler colonialism on the Korean Peninsula
to its climax and final takeover,42 until today influences the way zombies are
depicted for the Korean screen, for example, in Netflix’s first original Korean
series, Kingdom, which tells the story of a political intrigue and the danger of
a “zombie attack” that in a way resembles the invasion by Hideyoshi, which
supposedly had happened three years before the actual plot’s timeline. The
story consequently stages an experience of “zombie colonialism,” because, as
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yung emphasized in their article “Decolonization Is
Not a Metaphor” (2012), “[e]xternal colonialism often requires a subset of
activities properly called military colonialism—the creation of war fronts/
frontiers against enemies to be conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land,
resources, and people into military operations.”43 The colonizer-colonized
dichotomy44 in Kingdom is consequently created by the struggle between the
heroes, the Korean defenders of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), and the
68 Decolonizing the Undead

invading zombies, representing the Japanese forces that would not only threaten
the historical dynasty in the late sixteenth but should also abolish it in the late
nineteenth century.45

Conclusion

Regardless of these possible interpretations of Yoroi: Samurai Zombie that

are related to reflections on Japan’s history and the concept of wakon yōsai,
the film is an example of Japan’s zombie entertainment industry, which also
amalgamates different interests for its audience. Nevertheless, it provides just
one possible interpretation of the zombie image in relation to Japan’s past, as the
short reflection on that image in former colonized spaces, namely Korea after
Hideyoshi’s invasion or in the period of Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945,
could hopefully show.
Considering the success story of jidaigeki in the past, it is, however, not
surprising that Yoroi: Samurai Zombie, in contrast to productions related to
former spaces and times of Japanese colonialism, like Kingdom, attempts to mix
the historical genre with the very popular zombie genre as well and create some
kind of hybrid of itself again that eventually must nevertheless remain one-sided.
The Western zombie genre and the Japanese samurai genre are brought into
coexistence in a single film, while focusing on the haunting aspect of Japan’s own
past. Since there are other examples of such a genre mix in the last decade, this is
probably also related to commercial aspects, although, as it seems, the regional
approach in East Asia to the zombie genre varies according to the historical
experiences of colonizer or colonized. At the same time, as has been shown, this
amalgamation of images, topics, and stories is, in a way, a continuation of the
idea of wakon yōsai, albeit in the context of popular media. Hence the zombie
genre might offer Japan a chance to further decolonize the depiction of its own
past, if a true amalgamation and acceptance of the historical experiences of its
former colonies would be included in future approaches by films in that genre.
One could consequently conclude here that samurai have survived in an only
semi-memorized way for one and a half centuries and will probably continue to
appear in different film genres whenever someone sees this historic element fit
for the plot. That this happens at all is clear evidence that the samurai will never
fully disappear. They remain, however, so to speak, only one-sided zombies of
the Japanese imagination, which tends to rather embrace a filtered version of its
past, representing an ideal of a time that is past yet cannot be let loose without
 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past 69

daring to fully lose what is such an essential part of Japan’s tradition: honor,
dedication, and the wish to serve a greater good.

Notes

1 A concise introduction into the history and cultural impact of the samurai is given
in Schwentker, Die Samurai; Turnbull, The Samurai.
2 Kiyotada, Jidaigeki eiga no shisō. On the samurai film in particular, which
dominated this genre, see Galloway, Warring Clans, Flashing Blades and Silver, The
Samurai Film, 2006.
3 Bernardi, “The Early Development of the Gendaigeki Screenplay.”
4 Japanese names are given according to the Japanese language, i.e., surnames
followed by first names.
5 Desser, “Remaking Seven Samurai in World Cinema,” 17–40.
6 On the role of horror and violence in Japanese film and society, see, among other works,
Glaser, “‘Further Down the Spiral’,” 27–32; Pühler, “Spiel ohne Grenzen,” 37–47.
7 Jacob, “Tokugawa Ieyasu, Reichseiniger, Shōgun oder Japans Diktator?” 79–102.
8 Inazō, Bushido.
9 Shigeki, Meiji Ishin.
10 For a detailed discussion see Lutum, Das Denken von Minakata Kumagusu und
Yanagita Kunio; Sukehiro, Wakon yōsai no keifu.
11 Naomi, “Fukuzawa Yukichis Datsu-a-ron (1885),” 210–24.
12 Junji, Meiji kenpō taisei no kakuritsu.
13 The Gen’yōsha (Black Ocean Society) and the Kokuryūkai (Amur Society), often
falsely translated as Black Dragon Society, were probably the most well known of
these societies. Their influence, however, was often overemphasized, as a report
of the British Foreign Office from April 16, 1946, highlights: “The Genyosha [sic],
the parent of this type of society, in its origin consisted chiefly of disgruntled
ex-samurai who, seeing the futility of armed revolt to gain their goal of Japanese
expansion in Asia, organized pressure groups by which they could exercise a
decisive influence upon key members of the government, particularly in the
Ministries of War and Foreign Affairs.” Nelson T. Johnson, Confidential Report C4-
004, April 16, 1946, National Archives UK, Foreign Office, Foreign Office files for
Japan, 1946–1952, FO 371-54138, No. F-6420/95/23. A more detailed study of the
two societies is provided in Jacob, Japanism, Pan-Asianism and Terrorism.
14 Toyotomi had tried to conquer Korea, and even dreamed of a Japanese Empire that
would rule over China. His military campaign in the early 1590s, however, turned
out rather unsuccessful in the end. Swope, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail;
Lewis, ed. The East Asian War, 1592–1598.
70 Decolonizing the Undead

15 Shichihei, The Spirit of Japanese Capitalism and Selected Essays, for example,
describes “The Capitalist Logic of the Samurai” as one important aspect for the
later capitalist development of Japan.
16 The suicide of the general also aroused some interest in US newspapers. See, for
example, Bridgeton Pioneer (Bridgeton, NJ), October 3, 1912: 2; The Call (San
Francisco, CA), September 15, 1912: 1; The Evening Star (Washington, DC),
September 14, 1912: 1.
17 Mishima was also torn between tradition oriented nationalism and Western
modernization and recognition. For an introduction about his life and work, see
Jacob, “Mishima Yukio,” 187–201.
18 MacArthur was particularly in this aim when he was considering the aims of his
occupational government in Japan. Jacob, “MacArthur’s Legacy,” 207–27.
19 One example would be Terayama Shūji’s film Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971). See
Jacob, “Emperor Tomato Ketchup,” 153–70.
20 Harper, Flowers of Hell, 43.
21 Nakau, Something Wicked from Japan.
22 Foster, The Book of Yōkai. Lafcadio Hearn was one of the Westerners who dealt
with these stories as well and identified some similarities to the zombies, known in
the Western cultural hemisphere. Tomonori, “Rafukadio Hān to zonbi,” 31–51.
23 While there are quite a lot of manga series that deal with the subject, readers
themselves would also refer to themselves as zombies, as they sometimes turn into
otaku, begin to live in an imagined world, related to manga and anime, and lose
contact with reality. See exemplary Udagawa Takeo, Manga zonbi (Tokyo: Ōta,
1997). On the Japanese otaku culture, see Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, Izumi Tsuji,
eds. Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2012).
24 Hanazawa Kengo’s I am A Hero (Ai amu a hīrō, 2009–17) is just one example that
was also translated into English.
25 Bun’ei, “Zonbi no shigaku,” 67–88. With regard to Japanese research on zombie
cinema see Tomonori, “Zonbieiga kenkyūjoron,” 13–26.
26 Rhodes, White Zombie discusses the film in some detail.
27 Asako, “‘Howaito zonbi’ ni okeru zonbi no byōsha,” 138–9.
28 Asako, “Zonbieiga-shi saikō,” 55–68.
29 Yuki, “Ningen dearu, dōbutsu ni naru koto, zonbi ni todomaru koto,” 7.
30 For an introductory survey see Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution.
31 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 28.
32 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 29.
33 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 29.
34 Jacob, “Die Meiji-Restauration und die Neuordnung Japans,” 79–92.
35 Prorokova, “Romance as a Panacea and a New Generation of Intellectual Zombies
in Warm Bodies and iZombie,” 147–60.
 Samurai Zombies: Japan’s Undead Past 71

36 It is interesting to note here that there is also a feminist approach toward the
zombie genre, stressed by Yasayo, “Zonbi eiga no hirointachi,” 141–65.
37 There is also a problem of the so-called zombie houses in some (rural) regions of
Japan, which is in a way reflected in zombie films as well. Chihiro, “Shichōson ha,
akiya zonbi to tatakau koto ga dekiru no ka?” 35–42.
38 The two had worked on other projects before and are a well-known duo in the genre.
39 The festival is an important event for film fans in East Asia and was first organized
in 1997.
40 “Zombie-Splatter aus Fernost.”
41 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 4.
42 Uchida, Brokers of Empire.
43 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 4.
44 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 70.
45 The Japanese government and Japanese nationalists would, replicating older
imperialist narratives, argue in 1910 that the annexation was for the better and
according to Korean and Japanese interests. For a contemporary Japanese view, see
Iyenaga, “Japan’s Annexation of Korea,” 201–23.

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Norimasa, Kurihara Tōmas, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and the Pure Film Movement.” PhD
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japanischen Imperialismus oder zornige Enttauschung eines asiatischen
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 ­5

Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone”: The

Creaturely and Ecological Zombie
Josephine Taylor

What cultural and intellectual production makes us see, hear, and intimate the
land differently? What do we really know about the invisible, the inanimate,
and the nonhuman forms that creatively reside as afterlives of the colonial
encounter?
—The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and
Decolonial Perspectives, Macarena Gómez-Barris

The zombie permeates cultural production acting as the driving narrative force
in shows such as The Walking Dead and Z-Nation. In the “Fracking Zombies”
episode of Z-Nation, the central motivation of the only “human” characters
is not just survival amid the zombie apocalypse but an access to gasoline. As
the characters drive through a resource-depleted and ecologically devastated
landscape, the line “we’re out of gas” motivates the action of the episode.
Strewn among the empty highways are abandoned automobiles alongside the
somnambulistic rhythm of zombies, moving in and out unconsciously within
the remnants of petroculture.1 The characters’ logical destination is to the nearest
oil refinery, the Jersey Devil Refinery. What awaits them there is a “swarm” of
zombies mechanically moving toward the reverberations of the refinery. On
opening the oil storage tank, they are horrified to discover an indistinguishable
mesh of limbs and flesh immersed within the black oil. This mergence between
the undead and gasoline immediately presents itself as a corporeal metaphor
for society’s addiction to oil, a naturalization of our need for it as something
intrinsic to human life and for survival.
But what is perhaps the most striking element of this scene, however, is
how oil becomes flesh-like, merged with rotting yet animate human bodies.2
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 75

Such an image resonates with the strange and gothic registers crude oil often
possesses in the literary imagination, connected to images of contagion, buried
monstrosities, encounters with alien life forms, and an awakening of the dead.
Imagining crude oil as an ecological zombie has an emancipatory potential that
can incite an act of decolonization. This potential arises as a method for changing
our relations to energy, leaving behind imperial extractive projects to more just
and ethical engagement with the environment. Zombie figurations often act as
a geopolitical index to registrations of petroculture in crisis and as a crisis. In
the tension between the “always-on” zombie and the fears of system collapse
due to the end of peak oil, the zombie arises when the lifeworld expectations of
the capitalist core encounter the brutal realities of extractive violence elsewhere
in the world-system’s periphery. The metaphor of the zombie in this chapter is
thus deeply bound to petroleum as a commodity and to the sites of extractive
violence.
In this chapter, I explore China Miéville’s Covehithe and Reza Negarestani’s
Cyclonopedia, where I focus on their depiction of oil and its infrastructure as
an unthinking yet active entity, a collective force or “swarm” of the undead.
This depiction resists the capitalist presentation of oil as a mere resource and
commodity for human consumption. Such a process allows me to place the figure
of the zombie within the petrocultural landscape, capturing oil as a resurgent
figure of the walking dead. Like the critic Kerstin Oloff, I read the zombie as an
essentially “ecological figure,” what she terms “greening the zombie.”3 In addition
to these ecological aspects of the zombie, I also suggest the zombie figure can
be informed through Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, a non-anthropocentric
aesthetics and ethics, forming what I term the creaturely zombie.
The geographical placement of the two narratives draws us toward what
Macarena Gómez-Barris terms as the extractive zone and the peripheral spaces
of the world-system, subject to neocolonial forces and regimes. What Gómez-
Barris defines as the extractive view—seeing “territories as commodities,
rendering land as for the taking”4—is what currently shapes energy politics and
relations, and in particular the locations of these two fictions: Iran and the North
Sea, Suffolk. They are locations that are dominated by imperial regimes of energy,
rich with natural resources; the two texts thus magnify the destructive effects
of extractive capitalism at the semi-peripheral and peripheral space. Sharae
Deckard suggests extractivism “typically takes place in peripheralized zones,
from which raw materials are removed and exported to cores for processing
and production into commodities.” Through the world-system of core and
periphery, production of natural resources occurs in peripheralized zones to fuel
76 Decolonizing the Undead

consumer centers. Turning to the extractive zone in the literary imaginary, thus,
offers a way of magnifying what occurs at the (semi-) periphery. The extractive
view is challenged, however, through crude oil and its infrastructure becoming a
powerful actor of its own in the texts, a zombie resurgence and rebellion against
the reign of colonial forces and capital.
Drawing on what Kathryn Yusoff terms as “the afterlives of geology,”5 I
explore the creative manifestation of crude oil as a zombie in the literary
imaginary, suggesting it is a process of decolonial artistic practice. For Yusoff,
extraction is a colonial project, and thus perhaps the awakening of crude oil and
its infrastructure as an agential and rebellious force can alternatively be read as
a radical act of decolonization. Exploring the parallels between the process of
zombification and fossil fuel extraction opens us to Yusoff ’s understanding of
the afterlives of geology, what becomes inhuman matter, considered inert and
thing-like. As Yusoff suggests, “geology is often assumed to be without subject
(thinglike and inert) whereas biology is secured recognition of the organism
(bodylike and sentient).”6 Within the legacy and myth of the zombie and the
violent histories of oil extraction, there is a connection between the objectification
of life and matter, a colonization of both body and land. In such a process of
categorization, the category of the human is intimately bound within the logic of
colonialization. For Sylvia Wynter, the human is often defined according to the
Western bourgeois conception of what is and what is not human.”7 What Wynter
refers to as the coloniality of being, the Western white man, who becomes the
measure of all things, has important implications for how both land and bodies
become rendered as commodity.
As Yusoff further argues, “both enslaved, land and ecologies became subject
to encoding as inhuman property, as a tactic of empire and European world-
building.”8 The zombie, the Haitian slave, and crude oil itself are encoded as
inhuman property, resources for the growth of empire. This relation is further
illuminated through the ways crude oil is extracted from the ground, utilized
and labored upon like the zombie who is awakened from the depths of the
grave, mastered and controlled, to labor for the purposes of building an empire.
Both crude oil and the zombie become extractable matter under the mastery
of the white colonizer. Yusoff suggests, “extractable matter must be both
passive (awaiting extraction and possessing properties) and able to be activated
through the mastery of white men.”9 This passivity, however, is disturbed and
challenged as crude oil in the texts becomes an ecological and creaturely zombie
as planetary elements form a rebellious collective refusing to be harnessed as
extractable matter. My formulation of the ecological zombie is drawn from the
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 77

two separate traditions including both the figure of the Haitian zombie and its
Euro-American construction in popular culture. I engage with both as a type of
evolution, noting how these categories are different yet how both point toward
an unruly and rebellious potential against extractive capital.
The act of reimaging crude oil outside the bounds of capital and colonial
logic offers movement toward a decolonized and a non-anthropocentric
perspective. As Melanie Doherty asks, “how do we think the non-human role
of oil?”10 Such creative reimaginings must begin with a defamiliarization from
oil as a mere commodity, of its flow and movement defined by the actions of
the market and its relations. Combining Doherty’s question with the figure of
the zombie points toward a non-anthropocentric understanding of energy, a
movement that opens up to an unbound and liminal space which refutes the
categorization imposed by capital. The process of de-objectivizing petroleum
from capitalist logic is essential for building a movement toward decolonization.
In what Yusoff terms as the “Age of Man,” “Man is a dominant and dominating
mode of subjectification—of nature, the Non-Western world, ecologies and the
planet.”11 Under capitalist imperial regimes, in which man is the dominant mode
of subjectification, ecological matter is rendered as a lifeless commodity. Yet,
however, through the texts I analyze, the authors’ creative exploration of oil as
beyond the grasp of capital allows for petroleum to occupy its own autonomy
outside the extractive view.
In Miéville’s Covehithe and Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, we are told the
nonhuman story of oil. Negarestani’s theory fiction follows the paranoid notes
and articles of the Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, who draws the
conclusion that oil is an earth-crawling entity with a subterranean logic of
its own. Oil arises and awakens like the force of the undead in the narrative.
Miéville similarly opens us to the surrealist and gothic aspects of oil and its
infrastructure with his short story Covehithe. Set near the extraction site of the
North Sea, Covehithe follows a father and his daughter lurking in forbidden
territory where the oil rigs reside. As the narrative develops, we soon discover
the oil rigs are live and animate beings, which, having healed on the ocean floor,
now seek to drill new lands and to procreate. Defining petroleum as a zombie
in these two narratives breaks the typical construction of life as inert, as subject
to colonial and capitalist dynamics, and returns it a curious form of collective
agency. Like the zombie, oil appears as “a strange being, at once alive and dead,
grotesquely literal and blatantly artificial, and cannot be encompassed by any
ordinary logic of representation.”12 The zombie is slippery and ungraspable,
avoiding taxonomic distinctions moving through rot, decay, and contagion.
78 Decolonizing the Undead

Yusoff discusses the dangers of these divisions, as she argues that “the language
of materiality and its division between life and nonlife, and its alignment with
concepts of the human and the inhuman, facilitated the divisions between
subjects as humans and subjects priced as flesh (or inhuman matter).”13 The
creaturely and ecological zombie is therefore a direct challenge to the subject/
object dichotomy that shaped the histories of slavery and the rendering of land
as commodity under colonialism. Yusoff further notes on this slippage between
the human and the inhuman, describing “how the inhuman is made to slide over
personhood as a process of making the subjugated (as in the black body rendered
as flesh and units of energy) is an unrecognised dynamic of geological life that
rewrites a radically different text for the Anthropocene.”14 Through rewriting
and revising what is an agential subject, endowed with human qualities, we can
thus begin to challenge the violent divisions that push certain lives and subjects
outside “the structures of cozy humanism.”15
In both Negarestani’s and Miéville’s surrealist depiction of oil as an agential
force, we become introduced to what Anat Pick defines as the creaturely: a non-
anthropocentric project that follows a logic of flesh, exposing the animal or even
vegetative aspects which lurk within the human itself.16 Reading both oil and the
zombie through Pick’s creaturely prism draws together a material and corporeal
way of being which refutes and challenges commodification. In the same way
oil is often presented as a resource, a disposable body of material matter, the
zombie has a history in which it is severed from the power of consciousness and
agency. As Roger Luckhurst declares, “zombies are speechless, gormless, without
memory of prior life or attachments, sinking into an indifferent mass and growing
exponentially.”17 To trace the zombie to its origin of the Haitian slave, a myth that
incorporates both slavery and resistance, we find alternatively a mode power
and liberation in materiality.18 Like Pick’s advocation of a corporeal ethics, the
zombie myth has “an undercurrent of rebellion”19 in which the indistinguishable
mass of bodies and flesh challenges the hegemonic order. In what follows, I
adhere to Pick’s creaturely practice, in which “man as the centre of the universe
is no more, and a new history… the natural history of creatures—is born.”20
Pick’s creaturely poetics is centered on the work of the philosopher Simone
Weil, whose core principle is that vulnerability is a marker of existence. Whatever
one is, one is always subject to forces beyond control, and thus to injury pain
and death. For Pick, “the idea of contact is not only central to the experience
of reading Weil but is the very fabric of her thought.”21 Contact zones, cross-
contamination, and spaces of indistinction are central themes of the zombie
myth appearing through the fear and inevitability of contagion, the permeability
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 79

of our fleshy borders, the danger of contact with more than human worlds.
Negarestani’s theorization of both oil and dust as contaminating collectives
mirrors the movement of the zombie who proliferates and spreads through
disease and contagion. Cyclonopedia draws us toward these abject domains—
as oil and dust are shown to occupy subterranean complexes and underground
terrains. He defines oil, the petropolitical undercurrents of the earth, as the
“blobjective,” and dust becomes “dustism,” a nomadic entity “progressing at a
cosmic level.”22 Crude oil produces “diseases, deluges and blinding smog [and]
all employ dust as their primary agent.”23 Negarestani emphasizes the contagious
quality of oil, describing it as possessing “tendencies for mass intoxication on
pandemic scales.”24 Like Shaviro’s description of the zombie, oil is similarly “a
plague: it takes the form of a mass contagion, without any discernible point
of origin.”25 Oil conceived as a mass contagion captures its unruly nature—its
inability and refusal to be contained or captured. As critic Sarah Juliet Lauro
suggests about the zombie,
Just as the monster is never fully living nor entirely dead, it is never wholly
terrifying but also pitiable, in between agent and object, master and subject,
neither the capable captain nor merely his commanded craft—and this is
precisely what makes it worthy of our critical attention.26

By occupying such a position, moving between subject and object, agential and
individual yet material and collective, Negarestani’s presentation of oil unravels
capital’s attempt to capture it as a commodity, and instead introduces a non-
anthropocentric frame into our understanding.
If the zombie is, as Shaviro suggests, “all body”27 so too is oil in Negarestani’s
narrative. Its power lies not in individual subjectivity or abstract thought but
in its collective materiality. What Negarestani describes as the “thingness” of
petroleum, its ability to make things move, is a power of corporeality which
moves away from Enlightenment narratives of the atomized thinking subject,
distinct from physical affect and movement. Unraveling the Enlightenment
subject is an essential process of decolonization; like Yusoff suggests, “modern
liberalism is forged through colonial violence.”28 Oil as an animate and collective
force thus abolishes the “Cartesian” understanding of human life and biological
matter. Pipeline politics are not dictated by the capitalist and neocolonial
regime, but rather oil itself is shown to be the narrator: “the cartography of oil as
an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events.”29 Oil creates
its own “petropolitical network” in which political actors are its puppets, a
“singular anorganic body with its own agendas.” Negarestani goes on to describe
80 Decolonizing the Undead

oil as “hydrocarbon corpse juice: a post-apocalyptic entity composed of organic

corpses, piled up and liquidated in sedimentary basins (mega-graveyards).”30
This visualization of indistinguishable flesh and rotting corpses returns us to
both the myth of the zombie and Pick’s notion of the creaturely. Pick suggests the
creaturely invokes a “rawness of nerves” and follows the “logic of flesh,”31 creating
what she terms as a corporeal ethics and aesthetics. Through Negarestani’s
emphasis of the corporeal aspects of oil as a collation of past living organisms
crudely awakened by extraction machinery, we can begin to conceive of oil as a
creaturely entity, leading to an exposure of what Pick describes as “the flesh and
blood nature of reality.”32
Negarestani’s focus on corporeality, of bodily contact zones, and cross-
contamination, challenges the dominance of the colonizer, allowing for new
possible narratives to arise around subjectivity, autonomy, and agential power. It
thus challenges liberal and philosophical conceptions of the human, provoking
a new understanding of our position and relation to ecology and other species.
For Wynter, the local concept of Man/Human has an imperial universality.
As she notes, “the idea of Man at a particular moment of world history, the
European Renaissance, was also the foundational step for building racism
as we know it today.”33 In order to think and live decolonial practice, Wynter
argues, it is necessary to unsettle and undo Western conceptions of the human.
Negarestani’s undoing of Western liberal conceptions of the human offers a
mode of decolonial thinking in which new subjectivities are discovered.
The strange and almost grotesque amalgam of a creaturely petro-zombie
allows for radically reshaped subjectivities beyond the grasp and force of colonial
violence. Negarestani explores the agential power in the collective movement of
crude oil. Oil is a “pipeline crawler”34 moving through abject and underground
terrains, decentering man and opening up new passageways of possible revolt
and resistance. Like the Haitian Zombie, whose origins lay in the dialectic of
slavery and resistance, Negarestani’s depiction of oil is similarly connected to
a unity of opposites between “enslavement and rebellion.”35 While, on the one
hand, capital reduces oil to the status of an object, the same extractive process
lends it a rebellious form of agency which takes up the pipeline as but one of its
parts, always on the point of counteraction.
Dust takes on a similar zombie-like formation in the narrative; dust is, as
Negarestani describes, “a demonic mobilisation”36 in which “dust particles
originate from dark corners never trodden before, different territories (fields
of narration) and domains of invisible hazard.”37 Negarestani’s focus on all the
“dejected domains of being,”38 including tombs, decay, rot, and dust, envisions
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 81

a zombie-like collective. This mergence and process of cross-contamination

captures the hybridity of the zombie, neither living nor dead, somewhat conscious
yet deprived of reason and thought. There is, however, a resurgence and form
of resistance that characterizes geological matter in the text; as Negarestani
describes, “dust is the name of a rebellion marked by utter collectivity.”39 Like
the zombie, dust, oil, and other geological formations are “inherently resistant.”40
The text is characterized by “a fantasy of rebellion against the hegemonic
order,”41 as geological matter and the earth itself are described as “rebel disciples
of the sun.”42 Geology takes on a new meaning in the text as particles, organic
matter, debris, and remains discover their own agential power. Abject forces thus
come together as outsiders, peripheral residents who now take center stage. In
Negarestani’s description of the rebellious congregation of dust particles, we find
a movement akin to the formation of the zombie:

A dust particle collects its components from different milieus so distant from
one another that they can operate for each other only as outsiders. When dust is
utilised in creation to compose and concoct, it turns the object, or to be precise
the created composition, into a fierce operative of horror, with a progressively
thickening ominous plot or storyline . . . this emergence of new life forms and
collective particles might be apprehender as an insider take over, the rise of a
new people.43

Dust in this passage gives rise to a new people, a rebellious movement which
emerges from forgotten corners and leftover remains. Dust creates an “awakening,”
one in which capitalist and anthropocentric control becomes destabilized. Dust
and oil become zombie-like not through the American appropriation of the
allegory to describe an empty consumerism but instead through the Haitian myth
of resistance, what Lauro terms as “the counteroccupation of mythical space.”44
The agential, mythical, abject, and somewhat magical qualities attributed to
oil and dust allow for a way of reconfiguring what we conceive as waste and
commodity. This is oil’s “magical revenge”45 in the narrative, slipping from the
grasp of colonial and capitalist domination and revealing itself to be an affective
and rebellious movement of its own.
The anthropocentric usage and understanding of oil as fossil capital slowly
becomes deconstructed in Cyclonopedia, for oil surfaces instead as something
liberatory yet somewhat monstrous in the text. Similar to Vint’s description
of the zombie narrative which “challenges us to rethink life beyond the
anthropocentrism of the liberal subject,”46 Negarestani also breaks down Western
ideals of humanism through his conception of geology as a sentient and animate
82 Decolonizing the Undead

agent. The corporeal aesthetic of oil as formerly living matter connects to Pick’s
creaturely project of breaking down species distinction in order to expose
ourselves and other beings as material, temporal, and finite—oil in this literary
work thus becomes a creaturely archive of the living and the dead, a zombie-like
formation. Contact with oil, the living dead, becomes at once dangerous and
emancipatory, freeing ourselves from the Enlightenment subject that is in many
cases the source of oppression. As Lauro and Embry suggest in their Zombie
Manifesto, “to truly move post human, we have to not shrink the body but the
Enlightenment subject position.”47 The combined nexus of the creaturely, oil,
and the zombie serves to rid ourselves of this Enlightenment subject position,
the privileged subject who becomes the measure of all things. Instead the
aesthetic and ethics of the creaturely alongside the petro-zombie “resists being a
tool of capitalism, which is destructive rather than productive, which resists the
rational, which becomes anti-individual, anti-subject.”48 Cyclonopedia creates an
awakening of geological forces, rallying against the chains of Western capital and
the domination of the colonizer.
The figure of the petro-zombie as a rebellious and unruly movement likewise
permeates the pages of Miéville’s short story Covehithe. The narrative magnifies
the peripheral extraction zone of the North Sea, illuminating abandoned
production spaces and exposing us to the decaying remnants of the extraction
process. The eerie setting of an abandoned production lot, the absence of human
presence, and a nearby graveyard create a gothic atmosphere as the two central
characters’ inquisitive curiosity takes them toward the oil rigs. They wait for
the slow and mechanical movement of the oil rigs, as the infrastructure of
petroculture becomes awakened, their monstrous steps moving through the
seabed. They were “ruined, lost burnt, scuttled rigs [that] were healing on the
ocean floor and coming back.”49 What is perceived as inanimate and controlled
becomes chaotically reversed in the narrative. In Covehithe, crude oil and its
infrastructure are not merely a backdrop to a metropolitan landscape or simply
a form of capital defined by and subject to market relations; instead, it becomes
alive, colliding with a world in which it was once an object of domination.
The crisis which unfolds in Covehithe of oil rigs collectively drilling at will and
laying eggs on the seashore further recalls the movement of the zombie. As Jen
Webb and Samuel Byrand describe, “zombies aren’t social isolates—they seem
to prefer to live in groups, within built environments . . . they actively colonise
space for themselves—they seek to spread well beyond their local region and to
dominate places.”50 As we have noted in Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, there is a
sense of multiplicity, a gathering between ecological elements and infrastructure.
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 83

In this emergence of a multiplicity of oil rigs autonomously and collectively

acting upon their own will, we find that they possess the uprising quality of the
zombie, “the capacity to awaken, to throw of their bonds, to reclaim life amid the
morbid ruins of capitalism.”51 The descriptions of the oil rig slowly moving out
from the ocean encapsulate the methodical and rising movement of the zombie:

I­t shook the coast with its steps. It walked through buildings, swatted trucks
then tanks out of its way with ripped cables and pipes that flailed in efficient
deadly motion, like ill-trained snakes, like too heavy feeding tentacles. It reached
with corroded chains, wrenched obstacles from the earth. It dripped sea water,
chemicals of industrial ruin and long-hoarded oil.52

The chaos in which the oil rig wrecks across the landscape enacts the zombie’s
power of “radical refusal and destruction of value.”53 This speculative encounter
with energy infrastructure becomes a way of disturbing a system that follows
a model of business-as-usual, as the rigs defy subordination, opening up new
possibilities of alternative futures, a possible movement away from capitalist
regimes. The oil rigs possess the disruptive dualism of the zombie, possessing
what Shaviro describes “both as a monstrous symptom of a violent, manipulative,
exploitative society and as a potential remedy for its ills—all this by virtue of
their apocalyptically destructive, yet oddly innocuous, counterviolence.”54 It is
difficult to discern whether the oil rigs autonomous drilling across the globe is a
haunting specter of our past and future relation to petroleum, an incessant drive
for more extraction, or whether it is a way of capturing oil and its infrastructure
as possessing an agential power slipping from anthropocentric grasp.
This sense of opposition echoes Lauro’s description of the legacy of the
zombie as the dialectic of enslavement and rebellion. We witness the slow and
zombie-like steps of the oil rig in Miéville’s narrative as the characters await the
rig’s movements: “Another step—because these were clumsy steps with which
it came . . . it waded.”55 The rig’s mechanical and slow movements capture the
laborious and mindless work of the Haitian slave zombie. Yet, as Lauro suggests,
enslavement always entails the essence of rebellion ready on the point of being
launched. For Lauro, “there is something forceful, even malevolent about the way
the zombie undermines potential success of protest at the same time it embodies
revolutionary drive.”56 The zombie appears to be trapped within this dialectic
of slavery and rebellion, where the legacies of colonialism and the present force
of neocolonial regimes encode and block access to freedom. Miéville’s oil rigs
are similarly caught between these oppositions for at no stage do we have a
glimpse or access into the oil rigs’ subjectivity; we perceive the oil rigs as only
84 Decolonizing the Undead

the observer where they are simultaneously an object of awe and conversely an
impending threat to be exterminated.
The narrative moves back in time to the father’s memories of working for the
military in efforts to tackle the global awakening of oil infrastructure. The oil
rigs demonstration of life, agency, and movement is automatically rendered as a
deviant force which must be attacked, as is echoed of the commanding officers:
“Should we attack?”57 This collective awakening of oil rigs moving together as
a multiplicity, drilling and spreading across different regions, and occupying
space, is the rebellious force of the petro-zombie, moving outside the bounds and
limits of anthropocentrism. They are, what Miéville describes as, “petrospectral
presences”;58 like the zombie, they haunt and challenge, provoking questions
around subjectivity and the bounds of what is to be considered normatively
“human.”
The creative reimaginings of crude oil and its infrastructure in both
Cyclonopedia and Covehithe capture this move toward a new understanding
of crude oil outside of capital and the market. The playful destruction of the
subject/object domains allows for new possibilities to emerge: social, cultural, and
structural transformations to our current energy regimes. As Vint suggests,
“when humans refuse to be what liberal philosophy constituted as ‘the human’,
new possibilities emerge, including new models of the relationship between
individual and community.”59 These new models arise through the petro-zombie
who emerges as a multiplicity, creating new forms of community between
geological formations, debris, and leftover matter.
What could these new forms of communities and creative recodings of crude
oil do in such a moment of what Sheena Wilson terms an “energy impasse”?60
The energy impasse is a crucial turning point for an energy transition, but
as Wilson suggests, it is also a moment of “atrophy of the imagination that
blockades transformative action.”61 Wilson’s remedy to this blockade is to turn
to “the reintroduction of Other knowledge systems and world views, including
but not limited to feminist and Indigenous knowledges, which can help us
collaboratively imagine and collectively move toward socially just—decolonized
and feminist—energy futures.”62 Among these categories it is possible to also
find that of both the zombie and the creaturely, both of which are forms of
Other’s knowledge systems, outside the violence of colonialism. Working under
the nexus of the creaturely, the zombie, and oil, we find an unusual fellowship
which can transform our ways of thinking beyond the force and violence of
neocolonialism and colonial legacies. Miéville’s and Negarestani’s creative
reimagining of oil and its infrastructure as a powerful agent who thus refuses
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 85

to be measured by the barrel, rejects the label of commodity, and challenges the
systematic and structural violence of our global energy regimes. Turning to the
extractive zone in the literary imaginary presented seeds of resistance and hope
for an alternative from the present violence of energy production. The petro-
zombie under the lens of the creaturely strikes as a new formation that conceives
of just and perhaps a utopian understanding of energy beyond the imperialism
of extractive capital.

Notes

1 I refer to “petrocultures” in the context of the research collective co-organized by

Imre Szeman and Sheena Wilson. This collective illuminates how crude oil shapes
the social and cultural imaginary of the twenty-first century. Their proposal is that
energy transition is not just an economic or structural issue but a cultural one.
2 Many oil texts such as Daniel Yergin’s The Prize and Peter Maas’ Crude World often
invoke oil through this corporeal imagery, entwining this resource within our veins
and bodily needs. To do so, however, has problematic implications as it suggests oil
is intrinsic to our functioning and survival, leading to a process of naturalization
and therefore suggesting addiction to oil is a bodily phenomenon.
3 Oloff, “‘Greening’ The Zombie.”
4 Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 5.
5 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 3.
6 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 9.
7 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 266.
8 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 68.
9 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 6.
10 Doherty, Barrett and Worden, Oil Culture, 371.
11 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 54.
12 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 9.
13 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 9.
14 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 72.
15 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 9.
16 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 6.
17 Luckhurst, Zombies, 7.
18 Sarah Juliet Lauro’s collection on The Transatlantic Zombie traces the changes in
zombie imagery, the way in which it has been appropriated, returning the image
to its origins. This origin is located within folk tale from Haiti, “one that is deeply
associated with the nation’s history as a colony and the people’s past as plantations
slaves,” Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 3.
86 Decolonizing the Undead

19 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 16.

20 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 183.
21 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 3.
22 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 89.
23 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 89.
24 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 17.
25 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 9.
26 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, xi.
27 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 9.
28 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 19.
29 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 20.
30 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 27.
31 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 3.
32 Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 13.
33 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 118.
34 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 28.
35 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 5.
36 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 117.
37 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 88.
38 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 183.
39 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 89.
40 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 32.
41 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 31.
42 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 88.
43 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 90.
44 Lauro claims that “the zombie is a twentieth century commodification of a people’s
narrative about their ancestors commodification under transatlantic slavery and
its persistence in postcolony. In a way, then, the appropriation of the zombie
myth in a display like Occupy Wall Street risks seeming like a kind of second-
degree blackface, an appropriation of people’s cultural narrative of struggle and
empowerment for entertainment purposes.” In Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 11.
45 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 9.
46 Vint, “Abject Posthumanism, Biopolitics, and Zombies,” 175.
47 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 400.
48 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 407.
49 Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion, 344.
50 Webb and Byrand, “Some Kind of Virus,” 111.
51 McNally, “Ugly Beauty,” 124.
52 Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion, 343.
53 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 8.
54 Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories,” 9.
 Crude Monsters in the “Extractive Zone” 87

55 Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion, 341.

56 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 199.
57 Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion, 345.
58 Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion, 345.
59 Vint, “Abject Posthumanism, Biopolitics, and Zombies,” 178.
60 Wilson, “Energy Imaginaries,” 377.
61 Wilson, “Energy Imaginaries,” 377.
62 Wilson, “Energy Imaginaries,” 378.

Works Cited

Deckard, Sharae. “Trains, Stone, and Energetics: African Resource Culture and the
Neoliberal World-Ecology.” In World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture
of Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, 239–62. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Doherty, Melanie. “Oil and Dust, Theorising Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.” In Oil
Culture, edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, 366–83. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone, Social Ecologies and Decolonial
Perspectives. London: Duke University Press, 2017.
Hageman, Andrew. “Bringing Infrastructural Criticism to Speculative Fiction: China
Miéville’s ‘Covehithe’.” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 7, no. 1
(2019): 1–10.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. “Zombie Manifesto: The Non-Human Condition
in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah
Juliet Lauro, 395–412. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Luckhurst, Roger. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.
Marder, Michael. Dust. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
McNally, David. “Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia.” In Zombie Theory: A
Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 124–36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017.
Miéville, China. Three Moments of Explosion Stories. London: Macmillan, 2015.
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne:
Re-Press, 2008.
Oloff, Kerstin. “‘Greening’ The Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16, no. 1 (2012):
31–45.
Oloff, Kerstin. “From Sugar to Oil: The Ecology of George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, no. 3 (2017): 316–28.
88 Decolonizing the Undead

Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Shaviro, Steven. “Contagious Allegories: George Romero.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader,
edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 7–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2017.
­Vint, Sherryl. “Abject Posthumanism, Biopolitics, and Zombies.” In Zombie Theory: A
Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 171–82. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017.
Webb, Jen and Samuel Byrand. “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and
as Trope.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 111–23.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Wilson, Sheena. “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures.” In Materialism
and the Critique of Energy, edited by Brent Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 377–412.
Chicago: MCM Publishing, 2018.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:
Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The
New Centennial Review 3 no. 3 (2003): 257–337. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/
ncr.2004.0015.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2019.
 ­6

Undead, Undeader, Undeadest: Narrating

the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis in Nana
Nkweti’s “It Just Kills You Inside”
Fiona Farnsworth

“Boogeymen are real in Africa, folks”1 begins Nana Nkweti’s “It Just Kills You
Inside.” The story’s narrator, Connor, refers knowingly to the occult “imaginings
that rise up from the darkest of hearts”: a bold opening gambit which invokes racist
(and racialized) interpretations of Africa as a “dark continent” only to undercut
them with an unmistakable tone of mockery. Of course, the nod to “the darkest
of hearts” inverts and puns on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, widely criticized in
postcolonial academic circles for its reductive portrayal of a homogenous, savage
(and, indeed, “dark”) Africa. Most famously, perhaps, Chinua Achebe critiques
the novel as symptomatic of a need “in Western psychology to set Africa up as
a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar.”2
Moreover, in the heavy irony of statements like “This was Africa after all—the
land of juju, obeah, and kamuti,”3 it is possible to read shades of Binyavanga
Wainaina’s now-seminal “How to Write about Africa,” in which the author issues
a dictum to the aspiring author-cum-white savior: “Whichever angle you take,
be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention . . . Africa
is doomed.”4 This kind of “doom” narrative is mobilized in response to looming
material threat. The implication satirized is, of course, that there is only one
antidote to the inevitable decay (or outright, immediate destruction) presaged
by such a narrative: the benevolent “intervention” of the white author. These
opening sentences seem thus to gesture toward ongoing discourses surrounding
the ways in which “Africa” is written and written about, and particularly in
response to crisis and disaster. In doing so, they lay the groundwork for a zombie
story which is less about zombies and more about stories: one which not only
registers ecological crisis and its uneven impact throughout the world-system
90 Decolonizing the Undead

but foregrounds questions around the formal and aesthetic capacity of narrative
to represent or obscure crisis immediately and long term.
At this juncture, I must acknowledge my positionality as a white scholar
writing from and within the United Kingdom, and the privilege that affords
me in global (racialized, capitalist) structures of inequality. This short story
draws attention—even demands attention—to the politics of storytelling, and
I have tried to be sensitive and attentive to this in my critical engagement with
Nkweti’s work. Nonetheless, because of the positionality highlighted above, the
perspective I offer here is, in some ways, necessarily limited. My standpoint
is not one of lived experience but of a literary scholar and interested reader,
convinced of the discursive salience of Nkweti’s work to the narration of the
uneven effects of ecological crisis.
It is not always solely about how crisis is narrated, after all, but by whom
it is narrated. Nkweti’s narrator Connor (or “Con”—“short for [his] last name,
Connor. Long on innuendo”5) is a “fixer.” He works in “crisis management and
communications”—in other words, he is flown to various locations around
the world by governments and corporations to sanitize their public images in
the wake of political, social, and environmental catastrophe. In 1991, Con is
hired by French scientists based in Cameroon (on formerly colonized territory,
expropriated in the “arbitrary and uncompensated alienation of some of the most
fertile Bakweri land”6) to manage a media campaign that will initially silence
public narratives surrounding a zombie outbreak. The text is nonlinear in its
approach (a formal gesture toward the tension between the all-too predictable
trajectory of environmental crisis and the apparent swiftness of its symptomatic
disasters), and it moves between the earliest days of the outbreak and the crisis’
development on a world stage, including the emergence of the “truth” about
the outbreak in global consciousness when a spate of killings makes continued
cover-up impossible, to the present day. This is presented alongside modulations
in Con’s personal life such as marriage and fatherhood, and a contemporary
moment in which Con attempts to establish whether a zombie child was
responsible for the death of the film star who adopted her. I address modes
of storytelling contained within Nkweti’s story—in particular, folklore and
attendant mythos, and media and cultural production, alongside attention to
the narrative properties of the text itself—through which the zombie is invoked
in ways that are, though distinct, unmistakably and consistently imbricated. As
such, Nkweti’s narrative employs the contradictory figure of the zombie and its
status of duality as a means through which to register and represent the ways in
which “the tendency towards core-periphery polarization inherent in the logic
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 91

of capital [entails] the unequal exchange not just of economic surpluses but of
ecological ones too.”7 As Jennifer Wenzel asserts, for example, “A text need not
announce concerns with the environment in its theme and plot to illuminate
relationships among nature, culture, and power.”8 In this spirit, I contend that
the “dialectic”9 of Nkweti’s zombies may be read in conjunction with, and as
a registration of, the ongoing and uneven ramifications of environmental
degradation and disaster.
I am working here with an understanding of “ecological crisis” informed by
thinkers including Eric Cazdyn and Jason W. Moore. Cazdyn’s piece “Disaster,
Crisis, Revolution” investigates frequent and (he argues) erroneous conflation of
“disaster” and “crisis” as terminologies, arguing that where the social implications
of a “disaster” render it contingent and, often, predictable, “there is something
necessary about a crisis, something true to the larger systemic form.”10 Although
Cazdyn’s work is wide-ranging in its approach to the arenas in which “disaster”
might play out (he refers, for example, to “disaster” on the level of the individual
for sufferers of HIV and cancer “when the logic of cells overproduces so that they
no longer relate to the logic of the living body”11), it is his addressal of “crisis”
that is most salient here. He states, “Crisis was always a condition of the short
term. But now there seems to be the crisis of the long term.”12 Assuming such an
understanding of crisis as a condition extended, ongoing, or continuous—indeed,
as “playing out across a range of temporal scales”13—we might turn to Moore’s
suggestion that it may be productive “to think crisis as a process through which
new ways of ordering the relations between humans and the rest of nature take
shape.”14 The environmental angle I take is rooted similarly in Moore’s work on
capitalism as a “world-ecology,” in which he asks that we contemplate “a unified
theory of capitalism encompassing the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of
power, and the co-production of nature.”15 Important here is a recognition of
the fact that indigenous systems of knowledge in Africa have long understood
human and nonhuman lives as ecologically inextricable: Cajetan Iheka asserts,
for example, that “the relational positioning of the human to nonhumans is a
model attribute of the stories and social practices of indigenous communities
worth considering in an era of hypercapitalism.”16 Furthermore, reading the
figure of the zombie as both resulting from and representing the material
conditions of hypercapitalism, Kerstin Oloff has contended that while “the slow
labouring zombie has long been understood as representing the exploitation
of alienated workers” in Marxist criticism, “unless we grasp capitalism as a
world-ecology, certain aspects of the trajectory of this figure . . . remain open
to misreading.”17 Along these lines, I posit that Nkweti’s zombies are not only
92 Decolonizing the Undead

mediated by the uneven impacts of ecological crisis throughout the capitalist

world-system, nor are they exclusively a simple registration of such impacts,
but also highlight the ways in which storytelling, mythology, and narrative may
uphold and perpetuate the logics of capitalism as world-ecology.

­Folklore and Myth

The instigative “disaster” of the story’s zombie outbreak occurs at Lake Nyos, a
volcanic crater lake in Cameroon, in 1986: “Natural disaster, bucolic lake goes
acidic, belches up a cloud of CO2 gas that asphyxiates villagers for miles ‘round.”18
Geologists have speculatively attributed the real Nyos explosion to displacement
of rising levels of carbon dioxide, and an eruption following a gradual build-
up of gas19—both of which might be read as examples of Rob Nixon’s “slow
violence,” or “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of
delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”20 Nonetheless,
scientists have largely agreed that the eruption must have had a trigger, and this
is the point upon which Nkweti’s narrative pivots into the irreal, asking instead
what might be at stake—environmentally, socially, morally—should the trigger
have been not a landslide or a particularly aggressive storm but a nuclear test
conducted in secret by an ex-colonial power. In the story, the chief scientist
attributes it to Israeli military tests for a neutron bomb, an explanation that was
indeed given credence at the time of and shortly after the explosion, Eugenia
Shanklin explains, because it was thought to be “the newest weapon in the
American arsenal, an experiment conducted on behalf of Israelis, who wished to
see it demonstrated for possible use against Palestinians.”21 Con is unsure: “More
likely, the French had done this themselves . . . and now were on to the slapdash
ass-covering phase of the project.”22 Crucially, Con does not care to find out the
truth. He is motivated by money, rather than by moral or ethical practice; he is
representative of the same systems of colonial control that employ him; and, for
him, identifying the specific colonial power responsible for an atrocity affects
neither the narrative trajectory of his story nor his willingness to tell it.
Nkweti’s narrative also extrapolates an alternative set of social and
environmental ramifications. Chiefly, the gas cloud appears to have caused
the rising of the dead, alongside “the usual complaints: heartburn, lesions, and
neurological problems like monoplegia.”23 Key to this configuration is that the
“incremental and accretive”24 effects of the disaster resonate globally and over a
range of temporal moments and periods: there is the initial gas cloud, resulting in
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 93

nearly 2,000 deaths; physical displacement to refugee camps and other enduring
ecological consequences of the decimation of fertile land and its nonhuman
(and “other-than-human”25) inhabitants; the long-term health effects on victims
which are at best disruptive and at worst life-limiting; and even hitherto unknown
ramifications for climate and ecology. This is a perfect illustration of combined
and uneven development, or the sensibility that “parts of the world undeveloped
by capitalist modernization—or, indeed, underdeveloped by it—are nonetheless
coeval contemporaries of the world-system’s metropolitan centres”:26 the slow
violence of environmental crisis is most visible in the areas of the world-system
which contribute to it the least, and it is largely ignored by populations in the
Global North until they are affected directly. A parallel scenario is also presented
in reference to the Ebola virus, suggesting that cure research from the Global
North is withheld from countries in the Global South until, in Con’s words, “us
good white folks start dying.”27 Inequities in global medical research are explicitly
shown to follow a necropolitical logic in which life in the periphery and semi-
periphery is valued lower, and “vast populations are subjected to conditions of
life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”28
The living dead victims of the Nyos disaster are also written into textual
dialogue with extant zombie mythologies from Cameroonian indigenous
peoples. These mythologies of zombies have much in common with the original
Haitian zombi, a dialectic figure widely believed to have ancestral links to a
number of West African tribal traditions, and understood to signify both “the
positive, resistive return of the revenant and the specter enslaved, doomed to
repeat.”29 Attention is drawn, in particular, to local tales from the Bakweri people:
at the literal center point of the story, Con tells us of the vekongi who are “victims
snared by nyongo witchcraft, doomed to a half-life: withered existence by day
and entranced enslavement on the farmlands of their ‘masters’ by night.”30 Key
continuities with the zombi are evident in the common theme of enslavement,
and the understanding of the zombie as living dead therefore evokes the
ancestral potential for revolt. Stephen Shapiro invokes the Bakweri explicitly in
his discussion of recently “invented” zombie traditions as “new constructions
that register globalizing conditions in local-seeming idioms,”31 drawing upon
the work of Edwin Ardener in demonstrating that “while the rise and fall of
witchcraft discourse within the West Cameroon Bakweri synchronizes with the
concomitant shape of economic cycles, the return of these beliefs in the first
half of the twentieth century after German colonization and reorganization
of communal plantations involves historically new aspects.” In these new
mythologies, zombies and zombification are understood to be a result of nyongo,
94 Decolonizing the Undead

a “dynamic, flexible, fluid and common form of witchcraft among the coastal
and Grassfields peoples of Cameroon.”32 To this myth, John and Jean Comaroff
add the following:
­ heir land appropriated for the establishment of plantations manned largely by
T
foreigners, the Bakweri found themselves crowded into inhospitable reserves . . .
The living dead, many of them children, were said to be victims of the murderous
greed of their own close kind; they were sent away to work in distant plantations,
where witchmasters had built a town overflowing with modern consumer
goods.33

The salient ideas of kinship highlighted by the Comaroffs are also invoked in
Con’s own familial relationships, which are crucial, albeit peripheral, to the plot
of Nkweti’s story. Con characterizes the vekongi as the “kissing cousins” of the
Nyos victims. This phraseology refers to two things which are so similar as to
appear related, thus troubling notions of family, lineage, and kinship. A lineage
of this kind—shadowy, ghoulish—would be a narrative constructed around the
ideological nexus of the “living dead”: not biologically related but related in the
sense of similarity by virtue of their biology. This finds further articulation—and
further narrative mediation—in the bedtime stories that Con tells his daughter
Chelsea. Chelsea demonstrates an early fascination with the monstrous, but
figures like vampires are too tame for her tastes. Instead, her imagination latches
onto tales of zombies and, more specifically, the vekongi, although notably
these are still not figures of fear. In her vocal feedback to Con’s stories, Chelsea
even shortens vekongi to “Kongi” as a pet name for her “imaginary revenant
relatives”:34 an expression of affection particularly illustrative of the ways in
which the zombie may become divorced from its original context via the telling,
appropriation, and retelling of particular myths.
This is particularly important because Chelsea’s mother is Con’s ex-wife
Mambe, who is herself Bakweri, and yet it is from her American father that Chelsea
hears stories of her zombified Bakweri “kin.” Indeed, Con suggests that Mambe
hates the exercise of these deliberately horrifying stories, but he ignores, and even
belittles, her objections (“was I really going to listen to a woman who named our
child after a British football team?”).35 Con refers to Mambe at one point in the
story as a “conjure woman” because she features in a hallucinatory dreamscape
that he experiences while anesthetized following a zombie-related injury. While
use of this terminology signifies certainly a problematic exoticization of Mambe,
it is also indicative of Con’s lack of situated understanding of the stories he tells
or the ways in which they might be read euhemeristically as irreal registrations
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 95

of displacement under colonial occupation. Even on a prosaic level, inaccuracies

are present in Con’s narrative, which suggest that he is neither as well informed
nor as attentive as he considers himself; for example, he refers to “the Bakweri
tribe of North Cameroon,”36 despite the fact that the Bakweri people are found
chiefly in the south.37
These are not Con’s tales to tell, and yet he assumes responsibility for
their narration and appropriates them for his own purposes—the fact that
these purposes are paternal rather than mercenary is of comparatively little
significance. This is particularly striking considering that Chelsea’s response is
not one of fear. For her, these stories are demonstrably “a dress rehearsal for
facing life’s terrors head-on”38 rather than nemeses she must confront with any
physical immediacy—she can sleep safely because she registers the figures in her
bedtime stories not as “irreal” but as unreal. The detachment Chelsea exhibits is
also of significance in the story’s overall commentary on the nature of narrative,
because it evidences a false dichotomy enacted between the “backwoods
relatives,” for whom relatives lost to nyongo are all too (ir)real, and the “civilized,”
for whom such experiences are merely “ridiculous notions.”39 While it seems
that Con does not himself subscribe to such a division between the “civilized”
(“city folk,” characterized by their readership of global news media such as Jeune
Afrique and Le Monde) and the “backwoods” (principally associated with the
local and parochial, who are presented as uninterested in and even afraid of
the world beyond), the fact that he employs the terms at all, even mockingly,
suggests that he has no qualms about exploiting it nonetheless.
In a similar vein, folklore and attendant beliefs resonate throughout the story
beyond Cameroon. The story culminates in direct address:
This is what we tell you. The only truth you’ll ever know. And you’ll accept it
because you once set out sugar cookies for Santa, you trust deeply in the power
of your voice and your vote, and expect that when you die, when you are nothing
but bone and bliss, there lies a new beginning, a sweet hereafter.40

An uneasy comparison is evoked between belief in the myths of childhood—

“sugar cookies for Santa”—and belief in the crucial components of democracy—
“your voice and your vote”—as similarly facile and naïve. We return here to the
“doom narrative” with an unforgiving sense of irony: the naïve expectation of “a
new beginning, a sweet hereafter” recalls Kafka’s maxim (as quoted by Jonathan
Franzen) that “There is infinite hope, but not for us.”41 Once more, the naiveté
invoked is indicative of the structural unevenness of combined and uneven
development. The conditions that make possible a deep trust “in the power of
96 Decolonizing the Undead

your voice and your vote” are also necessarily those in which such power is at
least credible, if not actualized. Instead, the voices of those designated “Other”
are systematically silenced in a racialized, patriarchal, capitalist world-system;
and voter suppression is in evidence across marginalized populations within
national electorates, from the insidious barriers of bureaucracy42 to the overt
action of military and political coup.

Media and Cultural Production

Wenzel suggests in The Disposition of Nature that our urgent attention must
focus upon “recognizing the work that literature and cultural imagining do
all the time in naturalizing ideas about nature and shaping constituencies of
caring and regimes of visibility.”43 For Nkweti’s work, to recognize this work is
necessarily to attend to the various forms of storytelling implicated in this one
text: not simply cultural production and global media within “It Just Kills You
Inside” but “It Just Kills You Inside” as a cultural production that is itself shaped
by position and interaction within the world-literary system. I have noted the
registration of the tension between the slow violence of climate change and the
ostensible suddenness of the Nyos disaster and the “resurrections” it occasions.
However, perhaps more pertinent is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC)
understanding of the unreliable narrator as another of a number of “irrealist”
formal features,44 in which they suggest that such irrealist features are “discernible
wherever literary works are composed that mediate the lived experience of
capitalism’s bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation).”45 The
story begins, in fact, with the tongue-in-cheek subtitle “Based on true events.” As
such, a shadow of doubt is cast over the veracity of the story from the beginning.
Later, it turns out that “Connor” is our narrator’s last name: the nickname
“Con” is therefore nominally significant not only because of its pun on an act
of intentional duplicity but because it constructs another wall between reader
and “truth.” How do we put our faith in a narrator whose name we do not know?
And yet, Con seems to suggest, trust in unreliable narrators (and their unreliable
narratives) is characteristic of engagement with crisis media and, in particular,
media pertaining to crises linked explicitly to legacies of colonial violence. In
this configuration, “crisis management” and “communications” have come to
be synonymous. The “crisis” to be “managed” is not the ecological degradation
from the burst oil pipeline or the loss of life inflicted by Big Pharma; it is the
optics of such events in the sphere of public news media in the Global North,
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 97

the fickle nature of consumer loyalty, and the ensuing possibility of financial
detriment for company sales. For corporations and corrupt governments, the
crisis is not ontological. The crisis is capital.
One of the foremost ways in which Nkweti’s text interrogates the capacity
of narrative and narrator to register crisis is by calling upon existing cultural
production. S. J. Lauro explains that as the zombie became more popular and
more prevalent in film and pulp fiction particularly, it transformed into “a
more varied signifier” associated with, among other salient social concerns, the
“rapacious hunger of a capitalistic and increasingly corporate society.”46 Through
this modulation, themes of contagion and infection have become associated
with the plots of contemporary zombie fictions in the Global North; see, for
example, Romero’s commonly theorized Night of the Living Dead film series by
George Romero, comics and their televisual adaptations like The Walking Dead,
or the pathogenic fungus Orphiocordyceps unilateralis that turns the infected
into “hungries” in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts.47 Nkweti creates
an intertextual link with these kinds of cultural production in a brief reference
to Resurrection Hill—a diegetic blockbuster in which the adoptive father of the
zombie child Anasta is the star, and which is suggested to be very much the
kind of “B” movie that Con scorns. However, Nkweti’s work engages with ideas
of contagion only to refuse them emphatically, and therefore writes into a third
“transformation” (to borrow Lauro’s phraseology) of the zombie, one which
recognizes the historical trajectory of “appropriation of a myth that, ironically
or aptly, was itself about appropriation—specifically the appropriation of life
and labour under colonial slavery,”48 but which also reconsiders how the zombie
figure might be used in a contemporary global imaginary to think through the
unevenness of capitalism’s economic and ecological effects. When Con is bitten
by a zombie—his second face-to-face interaction—an overenthusiastic guard
cuts off the injured hand, “trying to ‘staunch the contagion,’ keep it from stir-
frying [Con’s] brain pan.”49 Con tells Mambe that the disease is “not airborne,
blood-borne. You either got it at Nyos or you didn’t,” but the statement is
accompanied by uncertainty; who, he asks, is he trying to convince? With such
rhetorical questions left unspoken but entirely legible to readers via narrative
focalization, there is no way to discern the “truth” about the outbreak. In addition
to its cinematic description, this scene is notable for its intertextual derision of
the guard’s “Dawn of the Dead hysteria”50—another nod to the ultra-prevalence
of “whitewashed” newer zombie narratives, in which the zombie figure becomes
“a more varied signifier capable of incarnating fears of disease and the body’s
vulnerability”51 and its origins in resistance to enslavement are all but erased.
98 Decolonizing the Undead

Indeed, the zombies in Nkweti’s story are both narrative and narrativized in part
via the mechanism of naming. We know already, for example, that the nickname
“Con” plays on the narrator’s profession as a fabricator of public relations fodder
and that he refers to Mambe as “Maim” after detailing the physical violence he
experienced at her hands (“She had a good throwing arm, that one”)52 which resulted
in visible scarification. However, in relation to the zombies in the story, the issue is
not of naming but of renaming. When we are introduced to the first zombie Con
meets—“Test Subject 13” of Orliac’s underground experiments—is nicknamed
“Lazarus,” in reference to the biblical figure who is resurrected by Christ. The
zombie who bites Con is nicknamed “Namaan,” again recalling a (lesser-known)
biblical figure: this time the commander of the Aramean forces in the Book of
Kings, who is “a powerful warrior but leprous, and thus disqualified from various
kinds of social interactions.”53 Finally, the zombie child to whom Con seems to feel
some kind of emotional bond is named Anasta, likely derived from the Ancient
Greek anastasis, meaning “resurrection.” Each of these acts of renaming recalls
dually the renaming of African countries as part of colonial projects of remapping
and dispossession—this is true of Cameroon itself, renamed by a fifteenth-
century Portuguese trader54—and the prescriptive enforcing of Christian names
on colonized and enslaved peoples. As well as acting in an allegorical capacity,
renaming here obscures the human lived experiences of the victims of Nyos prior
to their zombification. It is significant, too, that this renaming occurs at the hands
of scientists, recalling pseudoscientific eugenicist logics which frequently provided
the racist (and racialized) justification for colonial rule.
Nevertheless, Con is uneasy of Lazarus precisely because of his aura of the
uncanny. Although Lazarus bears little resemblance to popular media portrayals
of zombies as “shambolic shufflers, gray-fleshed and caterwauling like amateur
sopranos,”55 his skin is nonetheless “part nacreous, part necrotic,” and he moves
marginally slower than the living: he is “still undead, undeader, undeadest.”56
Nkweti’s use of polyptoton evokes a linguistic and material tension between the
states of “human” and “non-human,” as well as between the various conditions
of “living” and “unliving.” This seems testament to the role of the zombie in
complicating broadly understood binaries: if these are not absolute adjectives—
if it is no longer the case that one is either “living” or “dead” but can, instead,
fall somewhere in between—then does it not follow that this might occur on a
spectrum, that one might be comparatively “undeader” than another, or even
the “undeadest” of all?
Such questions bring us to the death of the famous movie star. In the nonlinear
narrative of the story, this is the thread that occurs in the contemporary
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 99

moment; and it provides the impetus behind Con’s storytelling, since the death
occurred ostensibly at the hands (or teeth) of Anasta, the zombie child adopted
by the movie star and her husband. Con’s task is to establish whether Anasta
was indeed responsible, and to drip-feed more palatable stories to global media.
In the death of the movie star at the hands of her child, and in conjunction
with the text’s other registrations of ecological crisis, the zombie’s original
association with rebellion and resistance is invoked and the existential threat is
inverted: when the child murders the parental figure, the capacity of the parental
figure to contribute to environmental degradation is mortally limited. This is
amplified in the very fact of the movie star as parental figure: as Iheka notes,
Hollywood’s “primary paradigm remains excessive consumption through the
making of capital-intensive films and the use of high-energy technologies with a
considerable ecological footprint,”57 and so the movie star is inextricably aligned
with an extractive industry that actively perpetuates the unevenness of ecological
crisis by making continental Africa “the disposable factory and junkyard for
[its] contaminative practices.”58 It also recalls the Comaroffs’ description of
many nyongo victims as both children and “victims of the murderous greed of
their own close kind”:59 current and future children face existential threat from
climate change, because of the industry and (in)action of previous generations.
Compounding this, the zombified appear not to age, thus condemning the
“children of Nyos” to live longer in a world marked by destruction.
However, as Lauro points out, “the irresolution of the zombie’s dialectic (not
master/slave but slave/rebel-slave) continues to thwart attempts to read the figure
as wholly resistive.”60 Such “irresolution” emerges in the narrative when it is
revealed that Anasta was not responsible for her adoptive mother’s death; rather,
a militant religious group (the “Born-Agains”) staged the attack, “siccing dogs
on the screen idol to drum up anger.”61 However, the orchestration of the attack
is deemed too violent and inflammatory a story and, instead, Con is instructed
to falsify a narrative in which the movie star suffers “Death by Automotive
Misadventure.” This is deemed “plausible enough given Cameroon’s notoriously
treacherous roadways.”62 While Stephanie LeMenager reminds us that our
contemporary “liveness, as in seeming to be alive, now relies heavily upon oil,”63
it is perhaps pertinent here to remember that oil is often also associated with
impending death: it is made up of decayed biomatter; its extraction and its use are
environmentally devastating; above all, it is finite. Along with the earlier explicit
references to crisis management following oil spills, the onomatopoeically rich
reference to “sticky crude imaginings that ooze up,”64 and a brief interjection
regarding “Hollywood pooh-bahs and Saudi sheikhs flush with petrodollars and
100 Decolonizing the Undead

paranoia,” the narrative of automotive fatality ensures that the text is formally
and aesthetically saturated with oil.
On the subject of the capacity or, indeed, the purpose of narrative in registering
environmental and social crises, then, LeMenager highlights the instability of
a perceived causal chain from “media à empathy à action.”65 Such a notion is
engaged with similarly by Wenzel in her “skepticism that images and narratives
work in such straight lines”66 and by Iheka in his contention that while African
ecomedia “allow us to visualize the impacts of environmental degradation,
and urge us to reorient our cultural habits to address the problem of climate
change,” they are nonetheless also “purveyors of ecological degradation that
disproportionately imperil Africa’s ecologies.”67 In “It Just Kills You Inside,” the
mechanisms through which pathos might be mobilized as a force for structural
change are demonstrably inadequate, but, again, this inadequacy is conditioned
by capital. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the news headlines that
pepper Con’s narrative for satirical effect—for example, “African Super Virus
Kills, Regenerates Dozens!”68 upon the initial finding of Lazarus and “African
Super Virus the Secret of Eternal Life!”69 These headlines are conventional in
their abrupt, punchy syntax and their exclamatory form, and they highlight once
more both the temporal discrepancy between the “ongoing” nature of crisis and
the suddenness of its appearance in media, and the extent to which narrative can
be formally manipulated.

Conclusion

Entangled with the broader narratives of global destruction is a more intimate

kind of “disaster.” Gradually, Con reveals that he has been diagnosed with terminal
cancer, but he also suggests that the loss of his child and wife has “snuffed out”
the “deep spark” of his identity.70 As such, he characterizes himself as a “dead
man walking”—seemingly playing with a notional idea that he is “zombified”
as a result of the knowledge of his own impending doom. Notably, though, it
is only on this individual level that he seems able to register the dynamics of
disaster. Otherwise, he justifies his actions on the basis of the “greater good”:
“Can you even imagine what would have happened to those teeter-tottering
African GDPs if the truth had gotten out?”71 As in much of the text, the sincerity
of this statement is debatable, and we might well wonder whether Con writes to
convince us—or indeed, himself—or to parody those tropes. Nevertheless, the
introduction of an attempt to justify complicity in colonial violence—whatever
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 101

its level of sincerity—undermines moments in which Con professes to have a

clean conscience. He says, “Look, I’m fine with what I did . . . I’m sure this might
make me a monster to some. But I’ve met real monsters, and trust me, I don’t
come close,”72 but in anticipating the perception of his actions as monstrous, Con
doth protest too much. If—as seems likely—the “real monsters” are the corrupt
officials, governments, and corporations whose capital fuels the narrative action
and funds the stories Con spins, then he is patently complicit. Also suggestive
is the fact that he invokes his daughter again here—“I sleep like a baby. Like
Chelsea”73—as though a guilty intrusion over which he does not quite have
total narrative control. An additional line of enquiry is illuminated in terms of
narrative’s capacity to incite action or to justify inaction—that of the stories we
tell ourselves.
The stories we read and the stories we tell are important, whether they are the
bedtime stories we invent (or appropriate) for our children or the news media
we consume on a rolling basis. However, Nkweti’s story confronts us with the
possibility that narrative is also drastically limited in its capacity to represent
and in its capacity to effect change, and this configuration plays, of course, on
neocolonial dynamics. For example, Con’s assertion that “A lot of Africans were
different . . . These folks have touched the slithery underbelly of darkness, so they
never quite bought the snake oils [he] was selling”74 is quite as ensconced in
well-worn colonial discourses of “darkness” and “savagery” as are those that he
mocks for their archaism (“bloodthirsty natives (Exterminate all the Brutes!)”).75
Thus, the story—though written by a Black Cameroonian American woman—
focalizes (and satirizes) the perspective of a white American man in telling a
story about telling stories about Africa and about the uneven reverberations of
crises throughout world ecology. As such, it registers and responds to an urgent
intersection between ecological crisis and the mastery of narrative and narrator,
and it introduces zombie figures and tropes in order to think through the short-
and long term under the threat of climate change’s slow violence: who lives, who
dies, and for whom existence is read as “a form of death-in-life.”76

Notes

1 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 83.

2 Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 15.
3 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 83.
4 Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa.”
102 Decolonizing the Undead

5 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 97.

6 Kofele-Kale, “Asserting Permanent Sovereignty over Ancestral Lands,” 106.
7 Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” 16.
8 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 12.
9 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 30.
10 Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” 649.
11 Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” 648.
12 Cazdyn, “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution,” 658.
13 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2.
14 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2.
15 Moore, “Crisis,” 100.
16 Iheka, Naturalizing Africa, 8.
17 Oloff, “From Sugar to Oil,” 317.
18 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 85.
19 Kling et al., “The 1986 Lake Nyos Gas Disaster in Cameroon, West Africa,” 173.
20 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2.
21 Shanklin, “Exploding Lakes in Myth and Reality: An African Case Study,” 170.
22 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 85.
23 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 85.
24 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2.
25 Iheka, Naturalizing Africa, 7.
26 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 62.
27 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 89.
28 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40.
29 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 2.
30 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
31 Shapiro, “Transvaal, Transylvania,” 33.
32 Nyamnjoh, “Images of Nyongo amongst Bamenda Grassfielders in Whiteman
Kontri,” 242.
33 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 795.
34 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
35 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
36 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
37 Mbaku, Culture and Customs of Cameroon, 13.
38 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
39 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
40 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
41 Franzen, “What if We Stopped Pretending?”
42 See, for example, criticisms of the newly introduced Elections Bill 2021–22 in the UK,
which would require electorate to display photo ID before voting in polling stations.
43 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 17.
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 103

44 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 51.

45 WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 51.
46 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
47 Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts, 52.
48 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
49 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 97.
50 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 97.
51 Lauro, “Introduction,” x.
52 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 93.
53 Bodner, The Theology of the Book of Kings, 142.
54 Kimeria, “The Most Unusual Ways Many African Countries Got Their Names.”
55 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 88.
56 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 88.
57 Iheka, African Ecomedia, 221.
58 Iheka, African Ecomedia, 221.
59 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 795.
60 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 33.
61 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 103.
62 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 102.
63 LeMenager, Living Oil, 6.
64 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 9.
65 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 17.
66 Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature, 14.
67 Iheka, African Ecomedia, 221.
68 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 88.
69 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 89.
70 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 103.
71 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 101.
72 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 101.
73 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 101.
74 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 101.
75 Nkweti, “It Just Kills You Inside,” 89.
76 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The
Massachusetts Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 14–27.
Bodner, Keith. The Theology of the Book of Kings. Old Testament Theology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019.
104 Decolonizing the Undead

Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts. London: Orbit, 2014. Kindle E-book.
Cazdyn, Eric. “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007):
647–62.
Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and
Millennial Capitalism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 779–805.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39105.
Franzen, Jonathan. “What if We Stopped Pretending?” Web, The New Yorker, September
8, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-
stopped-pretending. Accessed August 23, 2021.
Iheka, Cajetan. African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2021.
Iheka, Cajetan. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial
Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Kimeria, Ciku. “The Most Unusual Ways Many African Countries Got Their Names.”
Web, Quartz Africa, October 6, 2019. https://qz.com/africa/1722919/how-many-
african-countries-got-their-names/. Accessed August 25, 2021.
Kling, George W., Michael A. Clark, Glen N. Wagner, Harry R. Compton, Alan M.
Humphrey, Joseph D. Devine, William C. Evans, John P. Lockwood, Michele
L. Tuttle, and Edward D. Koenigsberg. “The 1986 Lake Nyos Gas Disaster in
Cameroon, West Africa.” Science 236, no. 4798 (1987): 169–75.
Kofele-Kale, Ndiva. “Asserting Permanent Sovereignty over Ancestral Lands: The
Bakweri Land Litigation against Cameroon.” Annual Survey of International &
Comparative Law 13, no. 1 (2007): 103–56.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie. Ithaca: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. “Introduction: Wander and Wonder in Zombieland.” In Zombie
Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, vii–xxiv. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Mbaku, John Mukum. Culture and Customs of Cameroon. Westport, CT and London:
Greenwood Press, 2005.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
­Moore, Jason W. “Crisis.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment,
edited by Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger and Imre Szeman, 99–102. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2017.
Niblett, Michael. “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature.” Green Letters 16,
no. 1 (2012): 15–30.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011.
Nkweti, Nana. “It Just Kills You Inside.” In Walking on Cowrie Shells, 83–103.
Minneapolis, MI: Graywolf Press, 2021.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Images of Nyongo Amongst Bamenda Grassfielders in
Whiteman Kontri.” Citizenship Studies 9, no. 3 (July 1, 2005): 241–69.
 Narrating the Unevenness of Ecological Crisis 105

Oloff, Kerstin. “From Sugar to Oil: The Ecology of George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, no. 3 (May 4, 2017): 316–28.
Shanklin, Eugenia. “Exploding Lakes in Myth and Reality: An African Case Study.” In
Myth and Geology, edited by L. Piccardi and W. B. Masse, 165–76. Geological Society
Special Publication. London: The Geological Society, 2007.
Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic
Periodicity.” [In English]. Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (May 2008): 29–47.
Wainaina, Binyavanga. “How to Write about Africa.” Web, Granta, 92, May 2, 2019,
2005. https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/. Accessed September 29, 2020.
Wenzel, Jennifer. The Disposition of Nature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
WReC. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.
 ­7

Zombie Proletkino: Labor, Race, and Genre in

Pedro Costa’s Casa de Lava
Thomas Waller

Recent scholarship has attempted to read the wave-like rises and falls of genre
production under the sign of the capitalist world economy, tracing a direct
correspondence between the patterned repetition of specific sets of cultural
forms and the cyclical rhythms of long-wave capital accumulation. If genres
are typically understood as exemplary cultural indices for specific moments
in history—such as punk rock for the youth subculture of 1970s Britain or
serialized realism for the long nineteenth century—then this scholarship rather
asks why it is that certain genres and styles tend to reappear in clusters over
the longue durée in apparently heterogeneous locations and at discontinuous
points in time. Stephen Shapiro, for instance, has shown how gothic narrative
devices tendentially recur during periods of primitive capitalist accumulation
to respond to the violence and dispossession engendered by cyclical
reconfigurations in the world market.1 In a similar vein, Sharae Deckard has
encouraged us to seek out homologies between literary fictions in the late
neoliberal era and texts produced in earlier historical moments in which
financialization had also been ascendant.2 Whereas most materialist approaches
to cultural production operate at the level of capitalist periodization, and thus
strive to differentiate the cultural forms of a given temporal phase from those
of another, these critics instead place the emphasis on periodicity: “the quality
or character of being periodic, the tendency to recur at intervals.”3 This shift of
focus, in turn, offers a way out of the limitations of earlier variants of cultural
materialism that had relied too heavily on a vertical and overly linear base-
superstructure model, for here cultural forms are considered not as reflective
or simply representational but as constitutive and co-productive moments
in capitalist value production.4 Genres, as more or less coherent bundles of
 Zombie Proletkino 107

cultural forms that bring together diverse social audiences through symbolic
conventions, might then be understood as endowed with a certain internal
logic that predisposes them to appear and reappear across similar moments
in capitalism’s long spiral to register analogous yet historically specific social
conditions.
The internal logic of the zombie genre is deeply rooted in the categories of labor
and race. As has been well documented, the figure of the zombie has its origins
in the Haitian experience of slavery and the plantation economy during the era
of European capitalist expansion in the seventeenth century. The hemispheric
Caribbean at this time functioned as a “haven of pirates and buccaneers,” “the
Wild West of the era,” as northwest European powers began to fight for control
over the region’s labor and resources.5 By the middle of the century, the French
had taken definitive control of what was later to become Haiti, and over the next
200 years would import large amounts of West African slave labor to cultivate
cash crops of coffee and sugar, leading to the “abysmal demographic collapse”
of the island’s Taíno indigenous population.6 The uprooting and resettlement
of cultures enacted by this traffic of human cargo across the middle passage
resulted in the formation of a complex creolized religion named vodou in Haiti.
The figure of the zombie as it is commonly understood is a product of this
creolized Haitian belief system, where it can signify either a bodiless spirit or
a soulless body. Due to its historical links to racialized slave labor, Kieran M.
Murphy has characterized the zombie as “a figure of mourning that incarnates
the fear experienced by plantation slaves, that is, the fear of the first modern
industrial workers.”7 Similarly, Kerstin Oloff has argued that the zombie is
imbued with “the memory of the first experience of industrial exploitation[ . . .]
as well as the experience of the ecological dimension of modernity, intensified
by the plantations.”8 In both senses, the zombie is “inseparable from the violent
history of the modern capitalist world-system.”
The emergence of the zombie in popular film culture coincides with the US
occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. This period saw the production
of gothic American fictions such as W. B. Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island
(1929), which was highly influential in popularizing the concept of the zombie
for a commercial mass audience. Oloff has perceptively remarked that the
appearance of the zombie in this text is intimately bound up with “the uneven
landscape of labor and ecology produced by capitalism,” as the narrator’s tale
of Haitian zombies is set against an incongruous backdrop of “cane fields in
juxtaposition with the gleaming symbol of industrial modernity, Hasco [the
Haitian-American Sugar Corporation].”9 This connection between racialized
108 Decolonizing the Undead

labor, the sugar industry, and the figure of the zombie is also explored in
several of the period’s major cinematic releases. Most famous in this respect
is the factory scene in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), in which Black
zombie workers can be seen laboring in a primitive sugar mill ill-suited to the
pace and demands of modern industry. Also notable is Jacques Tourneur’s I
Walked with a Zombie (1943), which takes place on a British West Indian sugar
plantation and features a memorable sequence in which the zombified wife of
the plantation owner is taken to a vodou houmfort held by the workers in a
dark and eerie setting of rustling cane fields. To this extent, the first images of
zombie cinema can be read as meditations on the racialized system of labor
exploitation that underpinned the production of sugar in the Caribbean during
the late colonial era.
However, the appearance of the zombie in early Hollywood film culture
ultimately had less to do with the experiences of workers on Caribbean sugar
plantations than it did with the interests of US capitalists in the first half of the
twentieth century, who were suffering from one of the worst economic recessions
in modern history. “Hollywood,” writes Joshua Clover, “sings to its audiences the
story of their waking lives moved to the faraway-near of allegory.”10 In these
terms, the proliferation of zombies on US movie screens in the 1930s and 1940s
can be read as a cultural anxiety on the part of moviegoers themselves in the
Great Depression era, for which the figure of the Black zombie served as an
allegorical remedy. As Shapiro has argued:
The initial zombie cinema typified by White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with
a Zombie (1943) seems fascinated by the possibility of American hemispheric
imperialism as an enabling solution to the Depression era’s failures. These
movies seem to wonder if colonized, foreign workers, illustrated by the barely
animate zombie, could provide the consumer goods that economic doldrums,
wartime rationing, and mass, domestic unemployment were otherwise not
allowing Americans to purchase.11

This allegorical reading of the early zombie as a racialized economic fix

suggests that the internal logic of the zombie genre might predispose it
to appear at moments during which crises of labor and consumption are
experienced most acutely. The genre’s narrative obsession with work and
industry would then be the visual register in which it communicates this logic
to its community of consumers. In what follows, I want to begin to test out
this hypothesis through a reading of Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s film
Casa de Lava (1994).
 Zombie Proletkino 109

Pedro Costa and Neoliberal World-Culture

Highly regarded among film critics for his cinephile style of referencing, his
political commitment to marginalized populations, and the slow, measured pace
of his films’ aesthetics, Costa is well known for defying generic categorization.
As Emma Fajgenbaum writes, attempts to define Costa’s films in terms of
conventional categories such as cinematic modes, subject matter, and geo-
cultural context “have a disconcerting tendency to destabilize the categories
themselves.”12 Over a career spanning three decades and seven feature-films,
Costa has experimented with an eclectic range of genres and styles, from the
moody noir of his first feature O Sangue (1989) to the cinema vérité of the
Fontainhas Trilogy (1997–2006) and the zombie genre itself in Casa de Lava.
But while the trajectory of Costa’s oeuvre in this way flits between cinematic
modes from one film to the next, it should also be noted that these generic shifts
often happen within the films themselves, so that a work such as Ossos (1997)
can be read as a piece of docufiction as much as it reactivates the genres of quest
and melodrama. Recent attempts to categorize Costa’s work under the banner
of “slow cinema” have emphasized his use of long duration shots, contemplative
close-ups, and minimalist narratives as potential criteria for classification,13
though such criticism risks losing sight of the sheer multiplicity of Costa’s generic
engagements through an emphasis on his art-house cinematic techniques. What
is remarkable about Costa’s films is their ability to both take up and destabilize
several cinematic genres at once, without exclusively identifying themselves with
any one tradition in particular.
This promiscuous approach to genre and cinematic form is unsurprising
once we consider the culturally hybrid character of semiperipheral zones in the
capitalist world-system, of which Costa’s native Portugal is a prime example.
While core-like and peripheral regions of the world-system are defined by their
relatively homogeneous combination of production processes, semiperipheries
stand out for their socially uneven composition which contains a mixture of both
core-like and peripheral aspects. To this extent, Immanuel Wallerstein describes
semiperipheral zones as caught up in an economic double bind: “Under pressure
from core states and putting pressure on peripheral states, their major concern
is to keep themselves from slipping into the periphery and to do what they can
to advance towards the core.”14 Far from a mere residual category, however, the
semiperiphery represents a necessary structural element in a world-economy
insofar as it mediates social relations between core and periphery by functioning
as a “collection point”15 or “transistor space”16 that translates the commodities
110 Decolonizing the Undead

of one sphere into the other. As Deckard and Shapiro have recently argued,
this liminal socioeconomic status means that “the semiperipheries are the
zones where political economy receives its greatest cultural inflection.”17 In his
canonical essay “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism,
and Inter-identity” (2002), Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos
describes Portugal as precisely one of these transistor spaces, where cultural
hybridity is born from a situation of combined and uneven development:
­ortugal is and has been since the seventeenth century a semiperipheral
P
country in the modern capitalist world-system. . . . Although this condition
has evolved across centuries, it has kept its basic features: an intermediate
economic development and a position of intermediation between the center
and the periphery of the world economy; a state which, being both product and
producer of that intermediate position, never assumed fully the characteristics
of the modern state of the core countries . . .; cultural processes and systems
of representation that do not adjust well to the typical binarisms of western
modernity—such as culture/nature, civilized/uncivilized, modern/traditional—
and may therefore be considered originally hybrid, even if ultimately merely
different . . . Portuguese culture is a borderland culture. It has no content. It does
have form, however, and this form is the borderland zone.18

It thus seems only natural that the work of one of Portugal’s most famous
directors should display such a heightened sensitivity to the admixing of style
and genre. Insofar as the uneven composition of his films’ aesthetics works to
register to the semiperipheral character of Portuguese society, Costa’s oeuvre
presents itself as an exemplary instance of “world-culture” properly speaking,
understood as the cultural production of the capitalist world-system.19
But in spite of the generic discontinuities of Costa’s filmography, it is still
possible to highlight some recurring themes and preoccupations, the most
prominent of which being his interest in the issue of Cape Verdean labor
migration to Portugal. Jacques Rancière, for example, has argued that the central
subject of Costa’s films “is also one at the heart of contemporary politics—the
fate of the exploited, of those who have come from the former African colonies
to work on Portuguese construction sites.”20 Indeed, the poverty as well as
marginalization of the Cape Verdean diaspora in Portugal is a topic to which
Costa has continually returned in his work, most famously in his Fontainhas
Trilogy, which explores the impoverishment of Cape Verdean immigrants
living in the Fontainhas shanty town in Lisbon, right up to its demolition by
the Portuguese government in the first decade of the new millennium (an event
dramatized in No Quarto da Vanda [2000], the penultimate film of the trilogy).
 Zombie Proletkino 111

Costa has repeatedly stated in interviews his belief in filmmaking as a political

vocation with a crucial role to play in the class struggle, such as when he claims,
“Most of mankind’s stories—I mean the stories of the lower classes—either have
been told wrongly or haven’t been told at all, so cinema has to step in.”21 To
this extent, Emilie Bickerton has proposed that Costa’s work be understood as
part of a new genre of postindustrial proletkino that reboots the working-class
commitment of earlier filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir to
address the reconfigured class identities of the late neoliberal era.22 Noting the
similarities between his filmography and those of directors such as Ken Loach,
Richard Guédiguian, and the Dardennes brothers, Bickerton argues that Costa’s
focus on the “marginals and outcasts, the surplus-labor flotsam and jetsam of
Europe’s past” bespeaks a resurgence in consciousness of labor at a time when
“the working class and its organizations, from trade unions to political parties,
have never been politically weaker.”23 This contradiction is then registered in
Costa’s films by the substitution of the isolated, atomized individual worker
for the collective subject of early proletkino, which Bickerton describes as a
necessary transformation given the de-industrializations, de-unifications, and
the rightward shifts of former social-democratic and communist parties that
have unfolded in Western Europe since the 1970s.24 While labeling Costa’s work
as postindustrial proletkino risks downplaying the generic pluralities of his
work, it does helpfully capture Costa’s political affinities with the economically
marginalized. Both Costa’s engagement with the issue of postcolonial migrant
labor and his vexed relationship with cinematic genre are forcefully combined in
his second feature film, Casa de Lava.

Absent Zombies

Casa de Lava has been described by Costa himself as a remake of Jacques

Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie.25 In an interview with the Portuguese press
at the time of Casa de Lava’s domestic release, he characterized it as “um filme
sonâmbulo, muito ‘zombie’” (a sleepwalking film, very “zombie”).26 Indeed, just
like the early Hollywood zombie films, Casa de Lava is centrally preoccupied
with the injustices of colonialism and racialized labor flows. It begins with a
shot of Cape Verdean construction workers piling into a Lisbon building works,
engaging in the sort of light-hearted back-and-forths proper to workplace
camaraderie. The industrial atmosphere, the mass of quick-moving workers,
and the backdrop of exposed construction beams have led Emma Fajgenbaum to
112 Decolonizing the Undead

liken this scene to one of cinema’s earliest sequences—Louis Lumiѐre’s “Workers

Leaving the Lumière Factory” (1895)—only this time, in reverse.27 This opening
scene is then cut short by the switch to a close-up of one of the workers in
particular, Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), who is seen looking down from a height at
the bustling construction site, wearing a mind-numbed expression and with the
whirring of machinery nagging impatiently in the background. While we never
see the incident itself, we learn from one of his colleagues that Leão has fallen
from this height and seriously injured himself—due to the narrative ellipsis, this
fall could have been either accidental or voluntary.
Seven weeks later, Leão is found lying comatose in a Lisbon hospital bed under
the watchful supervision of a nurse named Mariana (Inês de Medeiros). After an
anonymous letter, and check, arrives calling for Leão’s return to his home in the
Cape Verde islands, Mariana volunteers to escort him and is subsequently sent
off to the volcanic island of Fogo to tend to her patient and deliver him over
to his relatives. But when no one on the island appears to have ever seen Leão
before, Mariana begins to neglect her custodial duties and becomes fascinated by
the island’s singular community of inhabitants. Even in this remote landscape,
however, Mariana cannot escape the realities of postcolonial migrant labor, as
one night she meets a group of musicians who are preparing to travel to Lisbon’s
Sacavém district in search of well-paid construction work, and who want to
know if Mariana has ever been there and what the neighborhood looks like. But
Mariana seems somehow frustrated and confused at why these musicians would
want to travel all the way to a location from which she has only just arrived, and
she ends up storming off in a huff, leaving their questions unanswered. It falls to
the island’s fiddle playing old man to sum up this crossing of paths: “É o destino,
a Mariana chega e nós partimos” (it’s destiny, Mariana arrives and we depart).
The more direct affinities between Casa de Lava and I Walked with a
Zombie can be found in the two films’ narrative proximity. Both films, for
example, feature white, female protagonists who travel as nurses to a remote
part of the colonized world and there take an active interest in the lives of the
local community. In Tourneur’s film, the heroine is Betsy Connell (Frances
Dee), a Canadian nurse who is dispatched to the Caribbean island of Saint
Sebastian to tend to Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon), the invalid wife of
a sugar plantation owner. Dissatisfied with the doctor’s suggested treatments
for Jessica’s illness, and suspecting that she might have been placed under a
zombifying spell, Betsy turns to the island’s local magical belief system for help
and takes Jessica to a vodou houmfort amid the cane fields to be cured. The
film ends after Jessica has been led to her death by Carrefour (Darby Jones),
 Zombie Proletkino 113

a listless black zombie who stalks the edges of the film. Nuno Barradas Jorge
has explored in depth the narrative connection between the two films, noting
that Costa “relied substantially on Jacques Tourneur’s film as a central work
of adaptation” and urging us to understand Casa de Lava as a piece of “distant
referencing” that reworks both the narrative structure of Tourneur’s film and its
chief political concerns by tacitly adapting them to a different time and place.28
As it reproduces the narrative binary of local colonized community and white
European outsider, Casa de Lava thus presents itself as a postcolonial remake
of I Walked with a Zombie, and the comatose state of Leão can in this sense be
read as a condition of zombification closely linked to his status as a postcolonial
migrant worker.
Nevertheless, Casa de Lava is a film conspicuously void of all reanimated or
cannibalistic corpses, even eschewing Tourneur’s interest in the zombie figure’s
origins in vodou practices and beliefs. For this reason, its relationship to the
zombie genre as a whole is notably less forthcoming, perhaps surprisingly given the
canonical status of Tourneur’s film and its formative influence on Costa. As Jorge
notes, the original script for Casa de Lava had signaled a much closer narrative
and aesthetic relationship to I Walked with a Zombie than would eventually
materialize in the final film, as it included characters more recognizably zombie-
like in appearance and planned to reproduce some of the “sharp chiaroscuro
cinematography and eerie nocturnal atmosphere” that characterized Tourneur’s
earlier film.29 During the second stage of the pre-production process, however,
the decision was made to move filming away from mainland Portugal to the
island of Fogo in Cape Verde, and this resulted in a departure from the more
conventional “American” zombie film imagined in the film’s original screenplay.
Upon arrival in Fogo, Costa began using improvisational techniques that gave
more screen time to his untrained local actors and crucially decided to veer away
from the original plans for a monochromatic, eerie cinematography toward a
grittier realism marked by stark colors, candid close-ups, and a documentary-
like style of visual narrative. The zombie motif also underwent significant
alterations during this process. Whereas the earlier script had planned to include
a zombie more in line with the figure in Tourneur’s film, as filming progressed
the zombie theme was transformed by Costa into a type of “apathetic condition”
associated with mental instability to be transposed onto the psyches of the film’s
tormented cast of characters.30
In I Walked with a Zombie, there are two zombie characters: Jessica and
Carrefour. These two zombie characters are telescoped in Casa de Lava by the
figure of the Black construction worker Leão, whose comatose state during the
114 Decolonizing the Undead

first half of the film references the zombification of Jessica in I Walked with a
Zombie, while the close-up shots of his face when he awakens from his coma and
the images of him stumbling zombie-like across Fogo’s volcanic landscape recall
similar scenes in Tourneur’s film when Carrefour is subjected to the white gaze
of the movie camera. But these aesthetic references to I Walked with a Zombie
are complicated by the fact that Leão’s zombified state is never associated with
witchcraft, magical beliefs, or religious superstition: in simple narrative terms,
Casa de Lava merely relates Leão’s awakening from a coma after he has been
returned from Lisbon to his home in Cape Verde. This rejection of the magical
imaginary of the zombie genre in favor of a more realist cinematic style tallies
with Bickerton’s conception of Costa’s work as postindustrial proletkino, which is
also defined by its use of nonprofessional actors and documentary-like cinematic
realism.31 It thus becomes clear how Casa de Lava emerges as a kind of aesthetic
negation of Tourneur’s film, one that is intricately tied up with the two films’
locational politics, but also registered at the level of cinematic form through the
opposition between Costa’s realism and the modernist gothicism of I Walked
with a Zombie.
At the same time, however, and in spite of its commitment to some
renewed form of realism, Casa de Lava is littered with verbal allusions to the
returning dead and visual references to the aesthetics of canonical zombie
cinema, so that the film appears to be staking a claim to the same zombie
tradition from which it had only just distanced itself. The moment when
Leão awakens from his coma, for example, is signaled to the viewer through
a close-up shot in which his eyes are opened suddenly and stretched wide
as if he were not emerging from a coma but from the deep sleep of death
itself. Likewise, in one of the film’s iconic final scenes, we see Leão pursuing
Mariana over Fogo’s blackened volcanic landscape, on crutches due to his
state of convalescence, and with a limping gait that cannot but call to mind
the slow yet implacably menacing movements of the walking dead as they
pursue their human prey. Hilary Owen has also observed that Mariana’s first
appearance in the film is communicated to the viewer “through a series of
heavily gothicized images,” as she is surprised by an elderly patient in her
death throes who suddenly awakens and grabs hold of Mariana’s face. The
scene is presented in such a way that all we see are Mariana’s face and hair
“being gripped by a pair of disconnected, visibly blood-stained white hands,
appearing disembodied as if reaching from the grave.”32 These visual signals
to the cultural imaginary of zombie cinema are then matched by more explicit
references to the returning dead in the dialogue of the film. “Até morto se ri”
 Zombie Proletkino 115

(even in death he laughs), remarks one of the film’s peripheral characters

in a cryptic allusion to both Leão’s catatonic state and the frenetic efforts of
Mariana to find someone on the island who might be able to identify this
paperless construction worker.
One night at a party, the island’s fiddle-playing old man similarly whispers
to Mariana: “Aqui nem os mortos descansam. Devia ouvi-los como eu” (not even
the dead rest here. You must be able to hear them like I do). But the moment at
which these verbal and visual references to the undead collide most forcefully
comes when a local boy named Tano sneaks into the hospital at night and
approaches the bed where Leão is laid comatose. As Tano lingers over the
patient, inspecting his curious state of restful unconsciousness, Leão suddenly
awakens and clutches the boy’s arm, who subsequently manages to break free
and escape out the door. The next morning, Tano is found asleep on the beach,
and when Mariana enquires what has happened to the boy, his sister tells her:
“O morto quer matar o Tano” (the dead man wants to kill Tano). The fact that
Tano is found with bite marks on his arm further holds out the promise of
the zombie motif, while the film’s realist visual register would simultaneously
seem to foreclose this possibility. In this way, Casa de Lava is torn between two
opposing tendencies: on the one hand, to destabilize the tropes of the zombie
genre through a cinematic realism that pretends to represent postcolonial Cape
Verde in a manner entirely void of romanticism or magical overtones, and
on the other, to align itself with this same genre through implicit or “distant”
references to zombies in both the film’s aesthetics and the dialogue between its
characters.

Down to Earth

But if this vexed relationship to the zombie genre can be explained with
reference to Costa’s tendency to move fluidly between cinematic styles, and
to the culturally hybrid character of semiperipheral spaces more generally, it
nevertheless leaves unanswered the question of why Costa chose to work with
(and against) the zombie genre on this film in particular, and at this specific point
in time. According to Costa, the motivation behind filming Casa de Lava came
from a feeling of deep resentment for the social transformation of Portuguese
society during the 1990s:
Este filme é filho de desgosto. Ele guarda profundos vestígios disso. Desgosto com
o país, com o miserável humilhação política, social, artística, deste povo passivo
116 Decolonizing the Undead

e mau . . . Para nós, cineastas portugueses, foi o momento de começar a sofrer a

violência de um poder inculto e arrogante. E tomei a decisão de me afastar de casa.

[This film is a product of disgust. It is profoundly marked by this feeling. Disgust

with the country, with the miserable political, social and artistic humiliations of
this passive and rotten people. We Portuguese filmmakers began to suffer the
violence of a coarse and arrogant power. And I decided to get out of there.]33

The “miserable” atmosphere Costa is describing here is a reference to the free

market and reprivatizing Social Democrat governments of Aníbal Cavaco Silva
(1985–95), which succeeded in restructuring Portuguese society along the lines
of the neoliberal policies set out by the European Economic Community (EEC)
toward the end of the 1980s. The period of Cavaquismo, as it came to be known,
was characterized, above all, by a reversal of the revolutionary nationalizations
that followed the overthrow of the Portuguese fascist dictatorship in 1974. After
Portugal gained membership to the EEC in 1986, Silva started to remove clauses
protecting public assets from the volatilities of the free market, reduced by half
the market share of state-owned banks, and sold off a widening tranche of other
enterprises under the auspices of limiting the public debt.34 The liberalization of
trade with the rest of Europe further drove Portugal toward more labor-intensive
forms of industry that were less productive than other sectors, and by the end
of the decade real wages in Portugal accordingly lagged well behind the regional
average, with Portuguese workers in 1998 earning less than the two thirds of
the EU average, and only 71 percent of workers in Spain.35 Jacques Lemiѐre has
argued that Costa’s decision to move filming from mainland Portugal to the
Cape Verde islands in Casa de Lava was an implicit rejection of the “illusions”
of consumerism underpinning this period of Cavaquismo in Portugal, and
thus at once also an artistic protest against the neoliberalization of Portuguese
society.36 Given the zombie genre’s own elective affinity to crises of labor and
consumption, it is then a remarkable fact that Costa should turn to Tourneur’s
film in particular at this historical conjuncture as a vehicle for his feelings of
discontent.
A further correspondence between Casa de Lava and early Hollywood
zombie cinema lies in the issue of racialized labor flows. For just as the barely
animate Black zombie in Tourneur’s film offers an allegorical remedy for the
economic doldrums of the Great Depression, so does the figure of the Cape
Verdean construction worker in Casa de Lava contain its own crisis-ridden
history of labor and race. From the late 1950s, deskilled Portuguese laborers had
begun to migrate elsewhere in industrialized Europe in search of comparatively
 Zombie Proletkino 117

more lucrative work in the construction—cleaning and catering industries

of countries such as Germany, France, and Belgium. Despite mild economic
growth rates and rising urbanization, this mass exodus of labor power created a
vacuum in the domestic economy which the Portuguese state sought to fill with
imported labor from its African colonies. Accordingly, during the 1960s, masses
of Cape Verdeans were recruited as an economic fix intended to provide a
replacement for the hemorrhaging of the Portuguese working class.37 This is then
the historical terrain negotiated by Casa de Lava in its treatment of the flows of
Cape Verdean labor migration to Portugal and their centrality to the expansion
of the Portuguese construction industry. To the extent that the comatose Leão
functions as the film’s migrant labor zombie, Casa de Lava returns us to the
original problematic of Hollywood zombie cinema: the allegorical figuration
of the barely animate zombie as a racialized economic fix. These parallels
between Casa de Lava and I Walked with a Zombie might then suggest a generic
periodicity that predisposes zombie texts to reappear during moments when the
combination of these categories is economically enforced or politically desired.
But whereas the early Hollywood zombie films imagined this racialized labor
as a solution to the economic crisis of the Great Depression, Casa de Lava seems
to expose this type of economic fix as an illusion drawn from the world-system’s
axial division of labor, since the mass recruitment of Cape Verdeans for the
Portuguese economy from the 1960s onward could hardly prevent the cascading
of real wages and labor productivity that arrived in the neoliberal 1990s. With
welfare securities stripped and markets deregulated, the continued flows of
Cape Verdean migrant labor during the era of Cavaquismo simply served to
swell a surplus population the state cared little to look after, crowding already-
crowded district shanty towns that would ultimately be demolished. The fall of
Leão on the Lisbon building works is an apt metaphor for these migrants and
the marginalized that were allowed to slip through the cracks at the same time
as it visualizes crises of labor in times of postindustrial stagnation. “Down to
Earth,” the English title of Casa de Lava, does well to capture this sense of loss
and decline, while also referencing Costa’s attempts to escape the “illusions” of
neoliberalism by moving production from the Portuguese mainland to Fogo’s
volcanic landscape. The Portuguese title, on the other hand, carries the hope that
things might be different. It comes from a scene of the film in which Mariana
finds a letter written by a political prisoner who was held at Cape Verde’s
infamous Tarrafal prison camp during the days of the Portuguese dictatorship.
This letter, addressed to the prisoner’s lover, is filled with the promises he
hopes to deliver on once the revolution has arrived and he is released from
118 Decolonizing the Undead

incarceration. “Eu gostava de te oferecer 100,000 cigarros,” he writes, “ma dúzia

de vestidos daqueles mais modernos, uma automóvel, a casinha de lava que tu . . .”
(I want to offer you 100,000 cigarettes, a dozen of the most modern dresses, a
car, a little house of lava that you . . .). But at this point the letter breaks off. The
film’s title is the promise of a revolution yet to come.

Notes

1 Shapiro, “Transvaal, Transylvania.”

2 Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 90–1.
3 Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 90; Shapiro, “From Capitalist to Communist
Abstraction,” 1250.
4 Shapiro, “The Cultural Fix,” 102.
5 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II, 157.
6 Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 393.
7 Murphy, “White Zombie,” 48.
8 Oloff, “‘Greening’ The Zombie,” 42.
9 Oloff, “‘Greening’ The Zombie,” 36.
10 Clover, The Matrix, 72–3.
11 Shapiro, “Zombie Health Care,” 198.
12 Fajgenbaum, “Cinema as Disquiet,” 137.
13 Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema.
14 Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 29.
15 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I, 351–2.
16 Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 37.
17 Deckard and Shapiro, “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An
Introduction,” 10–11.
18 Santos, “Between Prospero and Caliban,” 9–10.
19 Deckard and Shapiro, “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System.”
20 Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 127.
21 Quoted in Fajgenbaum, “Cinema as Disquiet,” 139.
22 Bickerton, “A New Proletkino?” 107–25.
23 Bickerton, “A New Proletkino?” 109.
24 Bickerton, “A New Proletkino?” 123, 109–10.
25 Quoted in Corless, “Crossing the Threshold,” 28–31.
26 Câmara, “Convalescer na Ilha dos Mortos,” 2–4. All translations are mine unless
specified otherwise.
27 Fajgenbaum, “Cinema as Disquiet,” 144.
28 Jorge, “Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead,” 254–5.
 Zombie Proletkino 119

29 Jorge, “Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead,” 255–6.

30 Jorge, “Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead,” 258–60.
31 Bickerton, “A New Proletkino,” 125, passim.
32 Owen, “White Faces/Black Masks,” 190.
33 Quoted in Lemiѐre, “‘Terra a Terra’,” 50.
34 Finn, “Luso-Anomalies,” 14–15.
35 Finn, “Luso-Anomalies,” 15.
36 Lemiѐre, “‘Terra a Terra’,” 52. See also Jorge “Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead,” 261.
37 Batalha, The Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal, 133–4.

Works Cited

Batalha, Luís. The Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal: Colonial Subjects in a Postcolonial
World. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.
Bickerton, Emilie. “A New Proletkino?” New Left Review, 109 (January/February 2018):
107–25.
Braudel, Fernand. The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th
Century, vol. III. Translated by. S. Reynolds. London: Fontana Press, 1985.
Câmara, Vasco. “Convalescer na Ilha dos Mortos.” Público (February 10, 1995): 2–4.
Casa de Lava. [Film] Dir. Pedro Costa, Portugal/France, 1994.
Clover, Joshua. The Matrix. London: British Film Institute, 2004.
Corless, Kieron. “Crossing the Threshold.” Sight & Sound 19, no 10 (2009): 28–31.
Deckard, Sharae. “Capitalism’s Long Spiral: Periodicity, Temporality and the Global
Contemporary in World Literature.” In Literature and the Global Contemporary,
edited by Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri, 83–102. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Deckard, Sharae and Stephen Shapiro. “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-
System: An Introduction.” In World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of
Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, 1–48. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019.
Fajgenbaum, Emma. “Cinema as Disquiet: The Ghostly Realism of Pedro Costa.” New
Left Review, 116/117 (March/June 2019): 137–59.
Finn, Daniel. “Luso-Anomalies.” New Left Review, 106 (July/August 2017): 5–32.
I Walked with a Zombie. [Film] Dir. Jacques Tourneur, Los Angeles: RKO Pictures, 1943.
Jorge, Nuno Barradas. “Pedro Costa on the Island of the Dead: Distant Referencing and
the Making of Casa de Lava (1995).” Adaptation 7, no. 3 (2014): 253–64.
Lemiѐre, Jacques. “‘Terra a Terra’: Portugal e Cabo Verde no cinema do Pedro Costa
(1994–2000).” Devires 5, no. 1 (2008): 46–57.
Luca, Tiago de and Nuno Barradas Jorge eds. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016.
120 Decolonizing the Undead

Murphy, Kieran M. “White Zombie.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15,
no. 1 (2011): 47–55.
Oloff, Kerstin. “‘Greening’ The Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation.” Green Letters 16, no. 1 (2012): 31–45.
Owen, Hilary. “White Faces/Black Masks: The White Woman’s Burden in Pedro Costa’s
Down to Earth.” In Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, edited by
Mariana Liz, 185–204. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018.
­Rancière, Jacques. The Intervals of Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 2014.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism,
Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity.” Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 9–43.
Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic
Periodicity.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 29–47.
Shapiro, Stephen. “From Capitalist to Communist Abstraction: The Pale King’s Cultural
Fix.” Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1249–71.
Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the
Atlantic World-system. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008.
Shapiro, Stephen. “Zombie Health Care.” in This Year’s Work at the Zombie Research
Center, edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, 193–226. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2014.
Shapiro, Stephen. “The Cultural Fix: Capital, Genre and the Times of American
Studies.” in The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic
Novel, edited by Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, 89–108. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Diego:
Academic Press, 1974.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the
Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic
Press, 1980.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2004.
 ­8

“It Feels Like I’m Giving My Body Something

It Needs in an Intense and Powerful Way”:
Netflix, Santa Clarita Diet, and the Neoliberal
Feminist Encounter with Pleasure Politics
Roxanne Douglas

The word “zombie” is likely to evoke an image of horrific decay: a walking

corpse conjuring the mindlessness of consumerism or the advancing march of
late-stage capitalism, despite the decay in its system. It is less likely to evoke, one
supposes, Drew Barrymore looking pretty foxy. Santa Clarita Diet (2017–19) is
a Netflix original show where Sheila (Barrymore), a downtrodden wife and real
estate agent, mysteriously becomes a zombie. However, she is not the shuffling,
mindless ghoul of early George Romero canon; she is what I call a “cognizant
zombie.” Emerging around the same period that the term “mental load” came
into popular usage among feminists,1 the “cognizant zombie” demonstrates how
women are grappling with the biological thresholds of youth and pleasure at
the same time as coming to terms with the failed promise of neoliberal slogans
of “having it all.” Shows like Santa Clarita appropriate the figure of the zombie
to exemplify the tension between individuality and an alternative language
of collective rebellion that neoliberal feminism fails to offer. In this chapter,
I argue that Santa Clarita alerts us to neoliberal feminist anxieties around
women’s agency and desires under late-stage capitalism, particularly around
(peri)menopause. At the same time, the presence of the “cognizant zombie” is
also a useful tool to think through the nature of our relationship with Netflix’s
programming and interface through the lens of digital coloniality. Viewer time
and attention, in no uncertain terms, is a source from which streaming services
extract value.
122 Decolonizing the Undead

The “cognizant zombie” has arrived in Anglophone media in recent years,

and she is almost always a woman: for instance, Liv in television series iZombie
(2015–19) solves murders after being zombified by getting a new job as a
mortician in order to imbibe the memories from crime victims’ brains. I choose
the word “cognizant” here to reflect the gendered aspects of “being cognizant”
of others and their needs, or “being cognizant” of the consequences of impulsive
actions. As a “cognizant zombie,” Sheila has to manage her household, her family,
her (attractive) appearance, and her job at the same time as discovering and
managing her new compulsion to eat human flesh. This is directly counter to the
revolutionary potential that zombies, according to David McNally, “possess . . .
for revelry and revolt . . . As viewers, we (or at least many of us) derive a deep
pleasure from images of fantastic beings wreaking havoc upon polite citizens
of well-ordered society. And, here, we can locate part of the utopian charge
animating zombie rebellions.”2 This potential for “revelry and revolt” is actively
resisted by “cognizant zombies,” who are particular in their drive to do good in
society, despite their own destructive compulsions. Romero’s later films such as
Land of the Dead (2005) do show zombies who “are pretending to be alive” by
repeating behaviors that they performed before zombification, and are able to
strategically attack the human protagonists, but Netflix’s Sheila strives to live
a fairly normal life. The difference between Sheila and, say, Land of the Dead’s
Big Daddy is that Sheila deliberately redirects her flesh-eating compulsions into
what she and her husband perceive to be productive kills for the good of wider
society. Both Liv and Sheila essentially go back to who they were before their
zombification and endeavor to continue to play their role in the social system.
This is entirely counter to the revolutionary history of the zombie, as discussed
at length in this volume, and the purpose of the zombie as a tool to think with in
the international imagination about the destruction of society. The “cognizant
zombie” then encapsulates how, as Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry
point out, “capitalism depends on our sense of ourselves as having individual
consciousnesses to prohibit the development of a revolutionary collective and to
bolster the attitude that drives it: every man for himself . . . to move posthuman,
to lay humanism and its legacy of power and oppression in the grave, we have to
undo our primary systems of differentiation: subject/object, me/you.”3
The first season of Santa Clarita follows Sheila and her very understanding
husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant) as they negotiate the most ethical way to satisfy
her desire for live flesh. The show carefully establishes that this is a biological
need, implying that were it “just” a physical drive, then she would just have to
control herself. Nevertheless, she settles on eating neo-Nazis as a way of using
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 123

her powers for the good of society. Sheila, as a zombie with morals in mind,
brings into frame broader questions of control and of the individual, particularly
for women and people of color in the neoliberal, late-capitalist world. Feminism
since the 1990s has anxiously grappled with the tensions between acknowledging
the individual agential subject and developing a collective strategy based on
shared experience and struggle.4 Having and utilizing choice—especially in
balancing the needs of oneself and of the minoritized social group to which
one might belong—is the gold standard of freedom according to neoliberal
ideologies. Christina Scharff argues that

in a neoliberal postfeminist era, young women are positioned as beneficiaries of

increased opportunities. Now able to work, consume, and control reproduction,
young women are called upon to manage their lives independently. This
neoliberal, individualist imperative does not sit well with perceptions of
feminism as involving collective struggle. Young women reject feminism because
they regard it as a collective movement which robs them of the opportunity to
navigate their lives.5

Sheila’s zombification is paradoxically a plight and an opportunity. She becomes

more assertive at work, in her marriage, and “independently manages” her
cravings. Yet, Sheila is not the young subject that Scharff is talking about. Here,
a white woman’s renegotiation of the way in which she consumes and becomes
hyper-productive in the workplace is framed by the relative neglect of (peri)
menopausal women’s issues within mainstream feminism, as well as menopausal
women’s relative invisibility in media and power structures. Absent from Santa
Clarita is the hoard to which the zombie normally belongs. The neoliberal
feminist anxieties in Santa Clarita prioritize the pleasure, and social impact,
of the individual women—she does not have a hoard or collective struggle to
identify with, nor is she beholden to any master other than her drives. There is
only Sheila, and her ever more impulsive choices.
Neta Alexander asks, “but what exactly do we choose, when we choose
choice?. . . is it still possible to differentiate between our choices and the choices
the algorithm is making on our behalf?”6 The anxious social moralizing of The
Santa Clarita Diet also alerts us to our relationship to Netflix’s strategies to
generate content. Netflix not only instrumentalizes a viewer’s desire to “binge”
but, in fact, creates the very desires we understand to be our own. Alexander
argues that subscribers to Netflix

have remained unaware of the ways in which their choices shape the preferences
of others—and vice versa. In a narcissistic manner, they confuse the “You” in
124 Decolonizing the Undead

“Recommended for You” with a unique, complex individual rather than with a
group of strangers who all happened to have made similar choices. Ironically,
the fact that Cinematch’s criteria for recommendations remain hidden serves to
sustain the myth of personalization . . . we simply assume that Netflix knows us.
The god resides in the machine.7

In this way, our relationship with the Netflix interface evokes the zombie
hoard; indeed, Alexander I. Stingl and Sabrina M. Weiss ask, “if you are part
of a swarm, are you still you, and are you still free?”8 The paradox is that, both
in neoliberal feminist “lean in” sensibilities and Netflix’s appeal to the unique
“You” in its recommendation system, we are all parts of a collective, group,
or a type, while being encouraged to feel and behave like individuals. Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen notes that “we live in an age that has rightly given up on Unified
Theory, an age when we realize that history (like ‘individuality’, ‘subjectivity’,
‘gender’, and ‘culture’) is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than
of smooth epistemological wholes.”9 The white, middle-class, alive-looking
zombie, then, cannot provide us with “epistemological wholes”—Santa
Clarita is no zombie feminist manifesto—but she can alert us to our blind-
spots about what it means to be a desiring and desirable agent during late-
stage capitalism.
At the intersection of the above themes are questions of autonomy, of
pleasure, and of desire. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias trace the genealogy
of tools of colonialism from the physical—“the telegraph pole, the Christian
cross, and the rifle”—and map this onto the digital means of generating capital.10
They point out that the indigenous activists during the Idle No More campaign
with “every tweet, Facebook post, blog post, Instagram photo, YouTube video,
and email we made . . . the largest corporations in the world . . . more money to
reinforce the system of settler colonialism.”11 Couldry and Mejias then trace
this trajectory onto an app which is “a program to bypass the part of the brain
that regulates thirst, reminding you to drink regularly to meet predefined
quotas while tracking your progress.”12 At the time of writing many women
input data about potential menstrual symptoms into “period tracking” apps
which “remind” or “notify” users that they might menstruate soon, and gives
advice on how best to care for one’s body at each stage of the menstrual cycle.
Couldry and Mejias conjugate the ideological and violent tools of colonialism
onto the ways in which technology and social media companies have quantified
human embodied experience and behavior to the point where basic needs
are not only served but bypassed and constructed by programs to which we,
willingly, provide crucial data. It follows that the North American Menopause
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 125

Society (NAMS) has developed a mobile app, MenoPro, which, according to

their website, is designed
to help you and your clinician work together to personalize treatment decisions
on the basis of your personal preferences . . . The app has two modes, one for
clinicians and one for women, to facilitate shared decision making.13

Much like Couldry and Mejias’ reading of the water consumption app, this
app presents a complex dynamic of agency and choice, of being informed
while also making decisions about one’s own body alongside another person
who is connected to you digitally through an app. Quoting JoAnn Pinkerton
of the NAMS, Calhoun notes that “we tell people who are grieving not to make
major changes for a year. I don’t think anybody’s ever said: ‘Don’t make a major
decision when you’re perimenopausal’.”14 There is a cultural uneasiness around
the decisions that (peri)menopausal women might make, because, like the
zombie, they are perceived as volatile due to biological changes.
At the same time, the Global South is becoming a part of Netflix’s viewership,
a new vista from which it can extract viewing data. Louis Brennan indeed cites
Netflix’s “mastery of local contexts.”15 According to the Harvard Business Review,
in 2018 Netflix had a presence in 190 countries, and was working on “improving
its mobile experience, including . . . streaming efficiency for cellular networks.”16
For the end user, this may feel like the “You” which Alexander identifies is
approaching consumable content more easily, perhaps democratizing digital
content. However, being able to engage with steaming services as and when
the impulse strikes expands the remit of the ways that content creators and
distributors such as Netflix can gather data. It doesn’t take much to read the
shuffling zombie onto the ability to access mobile streaming, which by necessity
will draw the user’s attention away from their immediate surroundings to focus
on one single product: the streamed media. This ambulatory separation of
attention and body speaks to Couldry and Majias’ concerns about technology
and the colonization of our attention and bodies, which the zombie in many
ways exemplifies. It follows that “Netflix sees such content production as not
just local-for-local, but also local-for-global.”17 In other words, one market’s data
drives content generation which can be used in other markets. The complex
individuated yet clustered customer-taste and experience model recalls how
“zombies never appear in the singular . . . Zombies, as a consequence, are about
relations, about togetherness and about ‘how to be together’.”18
The folkloric Haitian zombie had a master to whom it was enslaved, for
the Anglophone “cognizant zombie” she has no apparent master, and yet on a
126 Decolonizing the Undead

metatextual level these texts are constructing our consumption behaviors on

our behalf—while Sheila describes a new sense of agency emerging from her
zombification, she still must consume, and consume, and consume, despite the
consequences. Couldry and Mejias point out that the collection of our data and
integration of technology into daily life is not simply a case of aligning any and
all oppression as subalternity but rather that “the underlying function remains
the same as under historical colonialism: to acquire large-scale resources from
which economic value can be extracted.”19 For women, this means that questions
about “having it all” are characterized by “cognizant zombies” like Sheila, whose
managed condition still does not exempt her from mental loads, emotional
labor, and workplace politics. Indeed, her zombification in some ways makes
her a more effective and successful real estate agent and mother. Being effective
in society, according to Linda Zerilli, has “historically governed every iteration
of the ‘woman question’: what is a woman for?”20 Zerilli points out that early
feminism’s calls for women’s rights made the case for social utility: “be it in terms
of difference or equality, the ballot [women’s suffrage] was not an end in itself
but a means to an end: the betterment of society.”21 That is to say that there
was an argument that it was expedient to give women rights for the good of all
people: white women, although not colonized subjects, leveraged the idea that
they were “large-scale resources from which economic value can be extracted.”22
In the United States, the women’s suffrage movement and the abolition
movement are historically linked. While not strictly analogous struggles, Angela
Davis (1983) explains that the 1830s represented a time where white women’s
economical and familial roles were being redefined due to the Industrial
Revolution, around the same time in 1831 “the year of Nat Turner’s revolt, the
organized abolitionist movement was born.”23 Problematically, white women
compared their lot to slavery, either on the basis of low wages and poor working
conditions or “literally in their effort to express the oppressive nature of
marriage.”24 Fredrick Douglass also recognized “that women were indispensable
within the abolition movement” due to their numbers.25 Likewise, activists for
women’s suffrage recognized that while they petitioned for the liberation of
enslaved Black people, they were simultaneously making a case for women’s
participation in politics.26 In other words, each cause recognized the political
resources that the other could provide. The colonial history of the United
States, and therefore the Haitian zombie folklore, is a specter at the edges of
Santa Clarita—the very first shots of the first episode depict manicured lawns
in a desert environment, signaling the colonial occupation of the United States
as a whole, as well as middle-class suburbia’s encroachment on the natural
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 127

environment. Joel and Sheila are real estate agents who quite literally deal in
capital, and the name of the Santa Clarita Valley signals a history of European
colonization.
Inheriting this history, Santa Clarita is in some ways a problematic experiment
in what would happen if the Haitian zombie nightmare was visited onto the
perimenopausal white suburban woman. For enslaved Haitians, zombie folklore
at the most fundamental level represented an end to life without an end to
enslavement. The zombie, in this instance, is a culturally significant resource
from which value can be extracted to serve the needs of women’s neoliberal
anxieties: for instance, much of the comedy in the show is derived from observing
a super-strong woman with the ability to eat people control her rage when she
faces sexism or belittlement. We do not fail to notice that the emotional labor and
mental load of day-to-day household management still falls upon a woman, even
if she is undead. Reminiscent of the suffrage activists that Davis described who
aligned marriage with enslavement, Shelia’s characterization problematically
aligns the plight of enslaved and colonized peoples with her concerns over being
a successful businesswoman, mother, and remaining desirable to her husband
while her body slowly deteriorates.
One of the most problematic signals of this alignment in the show is with
the introduction of Loki (DeObia Oparei), a Black man whom Sheila initially
attempts to kill for food. She does this because her police officer neighbor, Dan
(Ricardo Chavira), blackmails her and points out that Loki is a felon that he
wants to “disappear.” The establishment of the federal prison system’s legacies
of enslavement is well documented in the Netflix film 13th, directed by Ava
DuVernay, released only a year before Santa Clarita. Shelia accidentally turns
Loki into a zombie, and in his first appearance as a member of the undead he is in
a bar, gently singing a folksy, acoustic version of Cat Steven’s 1971 Moonshadow.
This appearance is comedic, with Joel and Sheila armored in preparation to kill
him, initially subverting expectations that Loki will be even more violent in his
zombie form. Moonshadow’s lyrics include the symbolic loss of hands, eyes,
the mouth, and so on, gesturing toward the zombie’s eventual deterioration;
however, the part which Loki sings also contains references to land and plows:
“And if I ever lose my hands / Lose my plow, lose my land / Oh, if I ever lose my
hands / Oh, if, I won’t have to work no more.” Moonshadow is not a song about
enslavement; however, the symbolic weight of these lyrics is especially glaring
when put in context of the rest of the episode.
Earlier in the episode, Shelia hides the fact that she lost a toe from Joel, and
confides in Loki about this, since he is the only other zombie that she knows. It
128 Decolonizing the Undead

is no surprise that Shelia and Loki build a connection on the basis of their shared
experience, which turns romantic for him. Shelia rejects Loki’s advances, and he
plans to kill Joel as a consequence. This places Loki in the long-standing racist
cinematic tradition, that is, the rapacious Black man from who white women
must be protected. This echoes the sentiments of pulpy monster films such as
King Kong (1933) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), where white women are
associated with, or find affinity with, Black-coded subjects. Shelia and Joel kill
Loki in the same episode, releasing Shelia from her symbolic affinity with the
Black zombie, moving the narrative onto matters of scientific intervention into
Sheila’s state. Lola Olufemi points out:
White feminist neo-liberal politics focuses on the self as vehicle for self-
improvement and personal gain at the expense of others. . . . This model
works best for wealthy white women, who are able to replace men in a capital
structure. . . . It invisibilises the women of colour, low paid workers and migrant
women who must suffer so that others may “succeed.” It makes their exploitation
a natural part of other women’s achievements.27

In other words, Loki’s character as a Black male zombie exemplifies the vexed
neoliberal philosophy that there is a struggle that is shared between all women,
but here instead of women the struggle could be shared between the “only people
like us in the world.”28 Yet, Sheila and, in some ways, Joel experience “personal
gain” and “self-improvement” as Loki’s character is used as a vehicle for them
to better understand Sheila’s condition and to help them solidify honesty and
trust in their own relationship.29 Loki’s character is never revisited, nor is there
any sense of guilt or concern over his demise, especially as he was the only other
known zombie in the show at the time: Loki’s exploitation as a narrative tool
becomes “a natural part of [Sheila and Joel’s] achievements.”30
The question of agency and zombification has been historically feminized
in the popular imagination: as previously mentioned I Walked with a Zombie
reveals that a white woman is zombified and is thus without agency, likewise
White Zombie (1932), recognized as the first zombie feature film, sees a woman
(Madge Bellamy) become a vodou zombie at the hands of a white master (Bela
Lugosi), with the film’s theatrical poster touting that “he made her perform his
every desire!” Almost 100 years later, Aim for the Head (2011), a pulpy poetry
collection about zombies, uses the image of a 1950s housewife reimagined as
a zombie as its front cover, again evoking the problematic alignment of white
middle-class women’s concerns about marriage and enslavement. We can trace
a legacy of this feminization in a 1931 pulp-fiction short story “Salt is Not for
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 129

Slaves” by G. W. Hutter, which tells the story of a Black woman, Marie, who
recalls the Haitian slave revolution of a 150 years prior to a male, presumably
white, narrator. Marie appears human as long as she does not consume any
salt; if she does eat salt, she will become a zombie and rush immediately toward
her grave, like her peers did over a century before. Marie appears as “old as the
island,” and her survival depends on resisting food that is seasoned with salt due
to a curse that her old master had put on all his slaves.31 This curse ensures that
they would never get sick or die, and thus his slaves would remain valuable assets
that never need to be replenished. Without salt, it is implied, food simply is fuel,
rather than a vector for pleasure.
Marie’s story in “Salt is Not for Slaves” from the neoliberal perspective is one
of having been the “beneficiary” of an opportunity in that the curse granted her
a long life without sickness.32 Yet, she remains in her raced and classed position,
and so is doomed to work until she dies and is certainly not liberated by her
supernatural status. Marie is not quite a “cognizant zombie” in that she does not
have to manipulate a desire to eat human flesh for the good of society; however,
she does remain part of the system, working in kitchens and performing the
same tasks that she would have done a century and a half prior. Likewise, she
survives to become an older woman, unlike her male lover, because she manages
her condition carefully; Hutter writes that “she had tried to kill [a servant when
he tripped] because a little salt had fallen on her . . . her rage was as inexplicable
to me as it had been to him.”33 Marie is both a figure of denial (“salt is not for
slaves,” after all) and excess in emotion. Thus the “cognizant zombie” in Santa
Clarita represents an inherited monstrous potential of the older women,
especially in her sexual desires and capacity for anger and violence (and arguably
the power this bestows upon her), qualities which are not typically assigned to
older women.
Stingl and Weiss point out that
the condition of being already dead is the condition of . . . The new chronic . . .
their state of being as the ones who are already dead is a state that is currently “in
management”. . . people who are in constant crisis, where crisis has turned into
the new normal. The future of crisis as continued crisis or as “crisis to come.”34

There has been much critical ink spilled and feminist discourse over the erasure
of “women of a certain age”—even the colloquialisms regarding this group
being vague—which may represent a metaphorical “undead” quality to existing
in society as a (peri)menopausal woman. Likewise, it is significant that Marie’s
exact age is vague: “her years,” according to Hutter, “were impossible to reckon.”35
130 Decolonizing the Undead

At the same time there are numerous headlines about death and sickness at the
onset of menopause and use of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), a typical
medical intervention to ease the symptoms of menopause: “We don’t know
menopausal hormone therapy causes breast cancer, but the evidence continues
to suggest a link”; “Menopause? Start estrogen [sic] replacement therapy sooner,
to reduce heart disease”; “Breast cancer risk from using HRT is ‘twice what was
thought’”; and “Menopause experts say compounded HRT is unsafe” are all real
and recent headlines published in The Conversation and The Guardian.36 There
is a cultural narrative in the Anglophone world of erasure, silence, and death
around the condition of menopause. The female body becomes a “new chronic”
anticipating the “crisis to come.”37 This indeed holds true for Sheila, inasmuch
as there is no cure for her “condition,” yet a scientist, played by Portia de Rossi,
develops a “serum” which ceases, or at least slows, the decaying of Sheila’s flesh.
Lauro and Embry point out that “our fascination with the zombie is, in part,
a celebration of its immortality and a recognition of ourselves as enslaved to our
bodies.”38 There is a similar metaphor available to us in the body of the (peri)
menopausal woman. Testimonials from women who experienced menopause
published in The Guardian discuss symptoms and experiences which align with
Sheila’s in Santa Clarita, such as surges of adrenaline, surges of sexual appetite
(including one woman starting an affair), that they no longer bend to the will of
others quite so freely, and become more “themselves.”39 Sheila depicts the “revelry
and revolt” of giving in to one’s hormonal impulses and forgoing gendered
restraint for the perimenopausal woman.40 But, there are also symptoms which
put us in the mind of the zombie. For instance, NAMS describes how “decreased
water and fat content of the skin as well as reduced sweat and oil production
contribute to dryness.”41 According to mortician Caitlin Doughty, “skin often
becomes dehydrated after death. The once plump, living skin shrivels and
retracts.”42 The perimenopausal body takes on qualities of both living and dead
flesh. Several women also report sleep deprivation, making (peri)menopausal
women akin to those who, quite literally, go “bump in the night.” As a result
of this sleep deprivation alongside a normal daily work schedule, they report
how “the fatigue was really hard to deal with and was coupled with short-term
memory issues,” perhaps evoking the horror of the loss of cognition in the
traditional zombie.43
It is worth noting here that the Netflix model of releasing entire series on
one day and the “autoplay” function invites binge-viewing habits, which then
often result in bouts of insomnia or sleep deprivation for the end user. Casey J.
McCormick argues that binge-watching is integral to Netflix’s original House of
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 131

Cards: “the show’s thematic emphasis on addiction, power, and bodily exhaustion
draws attention to the physical and psychological components of a TV binge . . .
the viewer must confront the intensity of her immersion while in the midst of the
consumption process.”44 This is applicable to Santa Clarita, especially given “that
cultural attitudes toward binge-viewing complicate its negative connotations, as
viewers engage in self-aware, often ironic discourse regarding loss of control.”45
In “Salt is Not for Slaves,” Marie, once she has told her story to the narrator,
reveals that her life will end because “a few grains [of salt] hit my tongue” when
the other servant tripped with some at the beginning of the story.46 The passage
that follows reads: “‘but what difference does it make how it happened? I have
eaten and the curse is upon me. Perhaps a little more will hasten the time.’ She
licked her hands hungrily, then ran her tongue over the grass. I shuddered and
rose to my feet.”47 Seeing an older Black woman indulge in eating salt without
decorum and licking it from the grass, a sensual, almost sexual act, leaves the
white male narrator perturbed. Likewise, we often see Sheila battling for control
over her desires. This is especially self-consciously ironic given the show’s
discussions and pastiches of diet culture.
Santa Clarita was first advertised through trailers and posters which heavily
reference diet advertisements. One trailer sees Barrymore in a red dress and
red lipstick against a white background; she confides in the viewer by leaning
forward to whisper that the “secret” to how she feels “younger, more energetic
and sexier” is, as we might guess, “the Santa Clarita Diet.”48 The comedy in the ad
comes from our recognition of the horrors of the diet industry, and the culture
of virtuous self-denial surrounding it. Indeed, the series cites this virtue culture
with montages with cheerful music of Sheila preparing smoothies, subverted by
the fact that it is human flesh, and talking about her new high-protein diet with
her friends. In contrast to the cleanliness of the diet-style marketing materials,
we regularly see Sheila smeared with blood. In particular, when Joel kills their
neighbor, Dan, Sheila resolves that she will dispose of the body by eating it. We see
her in a bloodied bathroom, and slouched in her comfortable clothes, gnawing
on parts of Dan. The parallels of hiding one’s “failure” when one binges by hiding
in the bathroom are all evident in these shots, perhaps even reflecting the binges
of someone with an eating disorder. Sheila belches and experiences pleasure in
her excess; nevertheless, she needs to consume to excess in this instance to keep
her husband out of jail. McCormick points out that “the popularity of binging has
engendered an entire discourse on the transformation of TV that recalls some
of the most central debates in media studies: passive versus active consumption,
narrative interactivity, and the shifting power dynamics among media producers
132 Decolonizing the Undead

and consumers.”49 In other words, Sheila’s binge behavior, as pleasurable as it is

to her, presents us with questions about power and agency when we consider the
circumstances of the narrative.
Lauro and Embry point out that the zombie is a “boundary figure. . . . through
the simultaneous occupation of a body that is both living and dead, [it] creates
a dilemma for power relations and risks destroying social dynamics that have
remained . . . largely unchallenged in the current economic superstructure.”50
But, how much does Sheila and the “cognizant zombie” actually threaten these
economic and patriarchal structures? In an interview to promote the second
season of Santa Clarita, Barrymore is asked if she is good at dieting, to which she
gives a long reply which begins with her emphatically stating that she hates diets,
yet she goes on to recount that

when I first started the show I was 145lbs, and my life was kind of falling apart . . .
I used this show as a wakeup call for myself, and I said “Victor can I lose 20lbs
over the course of the show, and like, you know change my eyebrows and the
height of my shoes and my body language and the attitude, and go from someone
whose you know, kind of naïve and unhappy to someone who is empowered and
alive.”. . . then Season 2 I let it all go, and Victor was like “by the way, we’re picking
up in the scene we left off in.”51

Barrymore links her diet with gaining a sense of control over a life that she
states was “falling apart,” referring to her marriage breaking down around the
time of the first season’s production. She then ties her body (exercise, dieting)
to the show’s production to motivate herself, instrumentalizing the contractual
obligations that this would entail to look a certain way. Here, Barrymore exerts
control by relinquishing agency: by the end of this story, she is obliged to lose
weight to film the second season of the show. For Barrymore, her body is very
much at the behest of outside forces, despite implying ownership of this process.
This is arguably similar to the process of “binge-watching” via Netflix or other
streaming services, where an act of choice—choosing a show or film to watch—
impacts the body, as argued by McCormick.
Being a zombie enables Sheila to renegotiate the boundaries of her desires
and the possibilities of her body, but this is not without complication. For
example, in the first episode Sheila is being sexually harassed by her coworker
Gary. She starts to pretend to comply in order to get out of the situation: she
sucks his finger, mimicking fellatio. After some tension builds, she bites his
finger off and then proceeds to eat him. The choreography of her killing and
eating him is like a sex scene: she moans, she pushes him to the ground, and
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 133

she rips his shirt open. We then follow her husband, Joel, coming home to
find her with entrails hanging out her mouth at Gary’s groin, mimicking
being caught in flagrante. The scene comically cuts to Sheila saying, “oh Joel,
I really want to make this work.” At face value, Sheila was partaking in the
“revelry and revolt” of zombification by exacting revenge on her rapacious
colleague, but, on the other hand, actually using her zombie super-strength
has grievous consequences, as she and Joel continuously try to evade the
police following this murder.52 Sheila has physical power and she is more in
tune with her desires thanks to her zombification, but as a “cognizant zombie”
she still is subject to the same restrictions that she always was; her zombie
status is one which she has to hide, as many women hide the symptoms of
(peri)menopause, and does not grant her any more systemic agency, nor the
ability to shirk the system.
According to Jerome Cohen, “the folkloric zombie is a reduction of person
to body: an utterly dehumanized laborer, compelled relentlessly to toil, brutally
subjugated even in death.”53 While there is no master for the “cognizant zombie,”
the toil does not end. This encapsulates the nightmare of Sheila’s situation: at the
end of Season 1, when Sheila starts to lose control of her impulses, she chains
herself in the basement to protect others, but she continues to take work calls,
calls in takeout for her husband and daughter, and coordinates their schedules.
Problematic or not, this is the nightmare of the Haitian zombie visited on
suburban white women. Instead of being a madwoman in the attic, she is an
organized woman in the basement, unable to shirk the gendered mental load.
What do these distinctions say to us about agency and choice for women “of a
certain age”? Donna Haraway argues that a “slightly perverse shift of perspective
might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of
power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.”54 Sheila and the
“cognizant zombie” are promising tools to think with because they confound
and break down rigid imaginative categories; Sheila is at once dead and alive, a
desiring agent and trapped because of her hunger, assertive and feminine, and
yet, despite her “lean in” sensibilities, she does not provide the promise of cut-
and-dry solutions that neoliberal and liberal feminisms demand, suggesting
that perhaps there is more to the vexation between the individual and collective
negotiation of desire and duty.
The Santa Clarita Diet was canceled by Netflix in 2019, and is perhaps a
zombified show in its own right. While it will not get a fourth season (nor a
resolution to a cliff-hanger ending), it is available to stream at the behest of
a viewer, dormant in the digital realm of Netflix’s servers, ready to reanimate
134 Decolonizing the Undead

at any moment. Its cancellation seems counterintuitive on the surface

given that it was a “fan favorite” and received critical accolade.55 However,
as much as Netflix has been integrated into many people’s lives, it is not a
public service—it is a business like any other. Santa Clarita was canceled
despite its popularity with existing users because it was not attracting enough
new users. Like the zombie hoard, Netflix’s expansion model’s “underlying
function remains the same as under historical colonialism: to acquire large-
scale resources from which economic value can be extracted.”56 Netflix
creates desirable content not for “you” but to create new viewers. Like the
zombie, Netflix “is a machine that performs but two functions: it consumes,”
our data and viewing habits, “and it makes more consumers” from those
viewing habits.57 In our Netflix “binges,” we not only feed ourselves content
but unwittingly point Netflix in the direction of new “resources from which
economic value can be extracted.”58

Notes

1 In 2017, The Guardian republished a comic as The Gender Wars of Household

Chores: A Feminist Comic by the web artist known as “Emma,” which explained the
feminist concept of “the mental load,” suggesting that the term was coming into
Anglophone popular feminist consciousness around this period.
2 McNally, Monsters of the Market, 253–4.
3 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 106.
4 Spivak, “Feminism 2000.”
5 Scharff, Repudiating Feminism, 1.
6 Alexander, “Catered to Your Future Self,” 85.
7 Alexander, “Catered to Your Future Self,” 86.
8 Stingl and Weiss, “Between Shell and Ghost,” 94.
9 Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” 3.
10 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, ix.
11 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, ix–x.
12 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, x.
13 “MenoPro Mobile App.”
14 “Surviving Perimenopause.”
15 Brennan, “How Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years.”
16 Brennan, “How Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years.”
17 Brennan, “How Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years.”
18 Stingl and Weiss, “Between Shell and Ghost,” 90.
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 135

19 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, xi.

20 Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 8.
21 Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 6–7.
22 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, xi.
23 Davis, Women, Race & Class, 32–3.
24 Davis, Women, Race & Class, 33.
25 Davis, Women, Race & Class, 30.
26 Davis, Women, Race & Class, 39.
27 Olufemi, “Introduction,” 4.
28 Fresco, “How Much Vomit?”.
29 Olufemi, “Introduction,” 4.
30 Olufemi, “Introduction,” 4.
31 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 369.
32 Scharff, Repudiating Feminism, 1.
33 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 370.
34 Stingl and Weiss, “Between Shell and Ghost,” 95.
35 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 369.
36 de Freitas, “We Don’t Know Menopausal Hormone Therapy Causes Breast
Cancer”; Keaveny, “Menopause? Start Estrogen Replacement Therapy Sooner”;
Boseley, “Breast Cancer Risk from Using HRT Is ‘Twice What Was Thought’”; Hill,
“Menopause Experts Say Compounded HRT Is Unsafe.”
37 Stingl and Weiss, “Between Shell and Ghost,” 95.
38 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 88.
39 Osborne and Bannock, “I Miss What I Used to Be Like.”
40 McNally, Monsters of the Market, 253–4.
41 “Menopause FAQs.”
42 Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? 182.
43 Osborne and Bannock, “I Miss What I Used to Be Like.”
44 McCormick, “Forward Is the Battle Cry,” 105.
45 McCormick, “Forward Is the Battle Cry,” 105.
46 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 382.
47 Hutter, “Salt Is Not for Slaves,” 383.
48 SANTA CLARITA DIET Season 1 TRAILER (2017).
49 McCormick, “Forward Is the Battle Cry,” 101.
50 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 90.
51 Drew Barrymore Season 2 “Diet” Struggle Was Real.
52 McNally, Monsters of the Market, 253.
53 Cohen, “Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology),” 404.
54 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 15.
55 Robinson, “Here’s the Real Reason Why Netflix Cancelled Santa Clarita Diet.”
136 Decolonizing the Undead

56 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, xi.

57 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 99.
58 Couldry and Mejias, The Costs of Connection, xi.

Works Cited

Alexander, Neta. “Catered to Your Future Self: Netflix’s ‘Predictive Personalization’ and
the Mathematization of Taste.” In The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in
the 21st Century, edited by Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey, 81–97. New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2016.
Boseley, Sarah. “Breast Cancer Risk from Using HRT Is ‘Twice What Was Thought.’”
News. The Guardian, August 29, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/
aug/29/breast-cancer-risk-from-using-hrt-is-twice-what-was-thought. Accessed
March 26, 2020.
Brennan, Louis. “How Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years.” Business. Harvard
Business Review, October 12, 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/10/how-netflix-expanded-
to-190-countries-in-7-years. Accessed March 26, 2020.
Calhoun, Ada. “Surviving Perimenopause: ‘I Was Overwhelmed and Full of Rage. Why
Was I So Badly Prepared?’” The Guardian, March 1, 2020. https://www.theguardian.
com/society/2020/mar/01/surviving-perimenopause-i-was-overwhelmed-and-full-
of-rage-why-was-i-so-badly-prepared. Accessed March 26, 2020.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory, 3–25.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology).” Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (86) (2012): 397–412.
Couldry, Nick and Ulises Ali Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing
Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. (Culture and Economic Life.)
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Doughty, Caitlin. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about
Death. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
Drew Barrymore Season 2 “Diet” Struggle Was Real. United States: CBS, 2018. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkyjoeLNOyk&t=2s. Accessed March 27, 2020.
DuVernay, Ava. 13th. Documentary. Netflix, 2016.
Freitas, Will de. “We Don’t Know Menopausal Hormone Therapy Causes Breast Cancer,
but the Evidence Continues to Suggest a Link.” The Conversation, September 3, 2019.
https://theconversation.com/we-dont-know-menopausal-hormone-therapy-causes-
breast-cancer-but-the-evidence-continues-to-suggest-a-link-122721. Accessed
March 26, 2020.
­Fresco, Victor. Santa Clarita Diet. United States: Netflix, 2017–19.
 “I’m Giving My Body Something It Needs” 137

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway, 3–90.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Hill, Amelia. “Menopause Experts Say Compounded HRT Is Unsafe.” The Guardian,
August 26, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/26/menopause-
experts-say-compounded-hrt-is-unsafe. Accessed March 26, 2020.
Hutter, G. W. “Salt Is Not for Slaves.” In The Book of the Living Dead, edited by John
Richard Stephens, 369–83. New York: Berkley Books, 2010.
I Walked with a Zombie. [Film] Dir. Jacques Tourner, Los Angeles: RKO Pictures, 1943.
Keaveny, Paul. “Menopause? Start Estrogen Replacement Therapy Sooner, to
Reduce Heart Disease.” The Conversation, June 4, 2019. https://theconversation.
com/menopause-start-estrogen-replacement-therapy-sooner-to-reduce-heart-
disease-116890. Accessed March 26, 2019.
King Kong. [Film] Dirs. Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Los Angeles: RKO Radio
Pictures, 1933.
Land of the Dead. [Film] Dir. George A. Romero, California: Universal Pictures, 2005.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition
in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2 35, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 85–108.
McCormick, Casey J. “‘Forward Is the Battle Cry:’ Binge-Viewing Netflix’s House of
Cards.” In The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century,
edited by Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey, 101–16. New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism.
Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2012.
The North American Menopause Society. “Menopause FAQs: Understanding the
Symptoms.” https://www.menopause.org/for-women/expert-answers-to-frequently-
asked-questions-about-menopause/menopause-faqs-understanding-the-symptoms.
Accessed March 26, 2020.
The North American Menopause Society. “MenoPro Mobile App: A Mobile App for
Women Bothered by Menopause Symptoms.” https://www.menopause.org/for-
women/-i-menopro-i-mobile-app. Accessed March 26, 2020.
Olufemi, Lola. Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. 1–9. London: Pluto Press,
2020.
Osborne, Hilary and Caroline Bannock. “‘I Miss What I Used to Be Like’: Women’s
Stories of the Menopause.” The Guardian, August 25, 2019. https://www.theguardian.
com/society/2019/aug/25/i-miss-what-i-used-to-be-like-womens-stories-of-the-
menopause. Accessed March 26, 2020.
Robinson, Abby. “Here’s the Real Reason Why Netflix Cancelled Santa Clarita Diet.”
Magazine. Digital Spy, May 2, 2019. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a27341559/
santa-clarita-diet-cancelled-why-netflix/. Accessed March 26, 2020.
SANTA CLARITA DIET Season 1 TRAILER (2017) Drew Barrymore Netflix Series. YouTube
Video, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbXfhW6E6eI. Accessed June 16, 2019.
138 Decolonizing the Undead

­Scharff, Christina. Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World.

Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 2016.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Feminism 2000: One Step beyond?” Feminist Review, no.
64 (2000): 113–16.
Stevens, Cat. Moonshadow. Single. London: Island Records, 1970.
Stingl, Alexander and Sabrina Weiss. “Between Shell and Ghost: A Hauntology of
Zombies in the Social Imaginary.” In Vergemeinschaftung in Zeiten Der Zombie-
Apokalypse: Gesellschaftskonstruktionen Am Fantastischen Anderen, edited by
Michael Dellwing and Martin Harbusch, 69–122. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015.
White Zombie. [Film] Dir. Victor Halperin, Hollywood: United Artists, 1932.
Zerilli, Linda M. G. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.
 ­Part Three

Zombie Decolonial
140
 ­9

De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique:

Beyond Man, Nature, and the Posthuman in
Folklore and Fiction from South Africa
Rebecca Duncan

[O]ur present struggles with respect to race, class,

gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles of the
environment, global warming, severe climate change,
the sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s
resources . . . are all differing facets of the . . .
central ethnoclass Man vs Human struggle
—Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being”

Introduction

In the essay from which the above epigraph is taken, Sylvia Wynter examines
how a mode of being designated “the human” emerges from the revolutions that
have shaped the Eurocentric paradigm of knowledge since the long sixteenth
century. This category of humanity is bound up, she argues, with unfolding social
and ecological shifts; it must thus be “unsettl[ed]” to meet the challenges of the
planetary present.1 Taking its cue from similar observations, a developing strand
of literary criticism has begun to propose that speculative fiction might provide
a vocabulary for alternative, posthuman forms of existence. The argument that
follows here engages with this ongoing conversation, but—focusing on the
figure of the South African zombie—suggests that from vantages across the
African continent, it is not sufficient simply to rethink the human in more
accommodating terms. Instead, it is necessary to address how this category has
142 Decolonizing the Undead

been implemented over the history of what Walter D. Mignolo calls “modernity/
coloniality,”2 to suppress alternative forms of being and knowing in the interest
of identifying exploitable and expendable lives and environments on a planetary
scale. The human, in other words, requires decolonization, and this chapter
proposes that the zombie as it is deployed in fiction from contemporary South
Africa might facilitate such a project.
To make this argument, I draw from Latin American and Caribbean thinkers
associated with the “decolonial option,”3 and in doing so join with recent
scholarship that examines and develops their work in African contexts. For
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, who has written extensively on topics in this vein,
decolonial thinking offers the conceptual tools for making visible how—despite
formal decolonization across Africa in the twentieth century—“the domains of
culture, the psyche, mind, language, aesthetics, religion and many others have
remained colonized.”4 As a result, the decolonial perspective also “exposes the
fact that Euro-American epistemologies are exhausted opening up an opportune
moment for . . . decolonial epistemologies from the South.”5 Thus, Ndlovu-
Gatsheni writes, “decoloniality [i]s a necessary liberatory language of the future
for Africa.”6 The discussion below examines the figure of the zombie in light of
this possibility and proceeds in two phases: first, I outline how actually existing
occult narratives of zombification, proliferating across the sub-Saharan region,
register the social and ecological effects of the human as a colonial institution,
and how such discourses also potentiate a decolonial critique. Second, I bring
this discussion to bear on South African author Masande Ntshanga’s The
Reactive,7 a novel that carries the imprint of African zombie lore, and which—I
argue—capitalizes on its decolonial potential in a way that may be illuminating
more widely across postcolonial literary mobilizations of the undead.

The Coloniality of Man and Nature

In Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,”

the author considers how what she calls “Man1” and “Man2” appear—
respectively—during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Broadly, these
concepts designate a vision of the human as rational subject, a construct that
gains its definition in opposition to a postulated and subordinate object domain.
This version of humanity underpins the emergence of first the physical- and
then the biological sciences, and—given the universal purchase ascribed to
these disciplines—is taken to be universal in turn, becoming “overrepresented.”8
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 143

“Man,” on Wynter’s account, thus occupies the epistemic position described by

Mignolo—drawing on Santiago Castro-Gómez—as the “zero point”:9 conceived
as the rational master of all he surveys, this human provides a dislocated and all-
encompassing god’s-eye-view of the world, having been lifted out of the history
in which he is shaped.
It is in part the objective of Wynter’s essay to redress this dehistoricization.
The author shows how the binary paradigm in which Man takes shape
codevelops with racializing narratives that first appear during the colonization
of the Americas—the moment that, inaugurating a transoceanic division of
labor, also marks the inauguration of capital as world-system. Writing of this
context, Aníbal Quijano identifies what he calls the “coloniality of power,”10
a term that sheds light on how categories of racial difference—themselves
rooted in pre-existing patriarchy—are mobilized for capitalist ends to organize
the transnational distribution of paid and unpaid work. Building on Quijano,
Wynter illuminates how these hierarchies of race enable the construction of Man
as rational subject, ontologically distinct from an object world. She describes too
how that same vision of Man is deployed across the history of modernity to
ratify the treatment of certain, racialized lives as if they were objects: exploitable
or expendable according to capital’s demands. Summing up this point, she writes
that in the colonial context “systemic stigmatization, social inferiorization,
and dynamically produced material deprivation . . . serv[ed] both to ‘verify’
the overrepresentation of ‘Man’ as if it were the human, and to legitimate the
subordination of the world and well-being of the [colonized] to those of the
[colonizers].”11
The human as Man is thus central to the processes of domination that have
shaped geopolitical relations across five centuries of modernity. This conception
is equally implicated, as Wynter’s epigraph suggests, in the conditions of socio-
ecological inequality that characterize the global present. Writing in the domain
of environmental history, Jason W. Moore locates the Eurocentric paradigm
of Man at the root of currently unfolding planetary emergency. Harnessed
by capital, Man becomes a mechanism for “cheapening” the potential “work/
energy” of humans and extra-human nature,12 enabling lives and environments
that ostensibly fall outside the category of humanity to be conceptually congealed
into a freely appropriable resource. Thus, for Moore, the capitalist world economy
is more properly a “world-ecology, joining power, nature and accumulation in a
dialectical and unstable unity.”13 The effects of this long-maintained conjunction
are currently visible not only in deleterious planetary transformations but also
in the radically uneven, gendered, and racialized distribution of these caustic
144 Decolonizing the Undead

shifts. As Moore notes, it is “women, neo-colonial populations and people of

color” who disproportionately suffer the effects of present crises,14 which must
thus be understood as “systemically combin[ing] greenhouse gas pollution
with . . . patriarchy, and climate apartheid.”15

Z
­ ombie/i Posthumanism

In this uneven present, the product of a logic which expels “the majority of
humans . . . from Humanity,” the possibility of “planetary justice” requires—as
Moore notes—that we “dismantle . . . the tyranny of Man and Nature.”16 It is with
this imperative that we might turn to the zombie, since critics responding to
the postmillennial rise of commercial zombie fiction have proposed that such
texts have the potential precisely to unmake the human. Influentially, Sarah
Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry have argued in their “Zombie Manifesto” that the
zombie represents “the only imaginable spectre that could really be posthuman.”17
Critical posthumanism, Pramod K. Nayar writes, “involves a rethinking of the
very idea of subjectivity.”18 The theoretical postulate Lauro and Embry call the
“zombii” is intended to enable this revision through an extreme refusal “to
reconcile subject and object.”19 Importantly, this argument relies on a conception
of capital and ideology that suggests even “the individual is a fiction conjured
by the economic structure.”20 Animate but without consciousness, the zombii
represents a mode of being posthuman in a world where human consciousness
itself is an effect of capital. Hence, write the authors, “when we truly become
posthuman, we won’t even know it.”21
Though widely cited, Lauro and Embry’s analysis is not without its difficulties,
and sits uneasily alongside the history of enslavement, in which—the authors
themselves note—the contemporary zombie is rooted (more on this below).
There is a sense, after all, in which the zombii, a mindless nonsubject, resembles
the colonial construction of colonized peoples, whose lives are rendered “cheap,”
in Moore’s terminology, precisely on the grounds they are not fully rational. It
is striking, also, that Wynter’s own assessment of what lies beyond Man is not a
“nullified” subject,22 but a subject to which a richer consciousness is ascribed. The
objective of her interrogation is—pointedly—to “secur[e]. . . the full cognitive
and behavioural autonomy of the human species.”23 Indeed, posthumanism
generally—and paradoxically—risks replicating the logic of Man. Though one
of its key precepts is, as Nayar notes, that “the universal category of the ‘human’ is
not really universal at all,”24 the critical field nonetheless retains the generalizing
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 145

language of humanity, and so lends itself to prescriptions that, similarly general,

reproduce the dislocated god’s-eye-view perspective of Eurocentric epistemology.
“If today it is meaningless to universalize . . . Man/Human,” writes Mignolo with
Catherine Walsh, “it is equally limiting to conceptualise [the] posthuman beyond
the regional scope of actors, institutions, and languages.”25
The point sheds critical light on the zombii, which is explicitly offered as the
“truly posthumanist” subject.26 Part of what drives this universalizing impulse is
the total efficacy Lauro and Embry ascribe to the forms of knowledge sustaining
capitalist accumulation. Their argument leaves little room, in other words, for
the possibility that other modes of being and knowing might persist, even in the
face of capital’s epistemic impositions. In this way the analysis overlooks the real
endurance of indigenous cultures and belief systems in colonized regions, and
thus potentiates the uncomfortable effect of reinforcing colonial silencing and
suppression.

Decolonizing the Human

Mignolo’s own account offers an alternative to the zombii’s delineation of

capital and epistemology: for him, modernity/coloniality—though universal in
aspiration—is always fractured by what he calls “the colonial difference.”27 This
is the position occupied by those excluded from the category of Man, and which
thus provides a vantage from which Eurocentric knowledge and the material
states of precarity it produces in combination with capital, appear not natural
and universal but brutal, located, and arbitrary. While it is subject to colonizing
epistemology, experience in the colonial difference is also informed, on the one
hand, by the lived violence of objectification and, on the other, by “ways of life
and . . . thinking that have been disqualified . . . since the Renaissance.”28 The
point here is that forms of consciousness emergent in the colonial difference
facilitate a different mode of “thinking geo- and body-politically,”29 which in
turn makes possible not only a revision but a decolonization of the human. This
takes place when those historically expelled from this category apprehend the
material and epistemic violence in which it is implicated, and when, beginning
from the lived—and thus located—experience of marginalization, they draw on
local histories and knowledges to enact nonuniversal modes of being. Across the
rest of this chapter, I will suggest that, considered from a different perspective
to the posthumanist approach taken by Lauro and Embry, the figure of the
zombie might enable a decolonial engagement with the Eurocentric category of
146 Decolonizing the Undead

humanity. I will develop this idea via Ntshanga’s novel below; at this juncture,
it is necessary to turn briefly to the figure of the zombie in Africa and its
contemporary resurgence.

­Zombies on the African Continent

The origins of the contemporary zombie are usually located in the Haitian
slave economy, where it emerges amid the transoceanic capitalist relations that
constitute early coloniality. This zombie, writes Kerstin Oloff, is a “soulless
body . . . raised from the grave” at the behest of sorcerer, who then mercilessly
exploits the animate corpse.30 As Oloff notes, Haitian zombies clearly encode the
“experience of brutal enslavement” within the plantation system;31 however, the
source of Caribbean zombie figures lies in West Africa, in beliefs transported
across the Atlantic with peoples seized from that region. Though not uniform,
African zombie lore—like its Haitian counterpart—is predicated on the “primary
belief . . . that the soul can be influenced” from outside the body by magical
forces,32 and thus reflects the animist principle that Harry Garuba locates as
fundamental to epistemologies and cosmological formations throughout the
sub-Saharan region. African animism, writes Garuba, entails a “locking” of spirit
within matter. In a reversal of the Eurocentric impulse to divide consciousness
from the substance of nature, “animist thought spiritualises the object world,”
understanding these two spheres as inextricably interwoven.33 Implicitly linking
this worldview to zombie-like figures in colonial-era Tswana culture, John and
Jean Comaroff note that “sefifi”—a “state of non-being,” which “speaks . . . of empty
shells of humanity”34—is induced through the malicious manipulation of a self
that, as on Garuba’s account, is “not confined to the corporeal body,” but instead
“range[s] over . . . the sum total of its relations, presences, [and] enterprises.”35
This relational form of personhood—starkly distinct from Eurocentric Man—
can thus be accessed through people’s “footprints,” for example, or through
“magical operations on their houses, their clothes or their animal’s.”36
A number of critics have noted such threats are on the rise across sub-Saharan
Africa, and have been since the late twentieth century. The Comaroffs describe
how, in post-apartheid South Africa, “longstanding notions of witchcraft . . .
have come to embrace zombie-making, the brutal reduction of others . . . to
instruments of production; to insensible beings stored, like tools . . . at the homes
of their creators.”37 As in earlier Caribbean iterations, contemporary African
zombies also respond, as David McNally argues, to “sites where labouring
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 147

bodies are at risk,” and thus they too might be considered an effect of “capitalist
modernity”: an occult apprehension “of the corporeal power on which capital
feeds.”38 It would be a mistake, however, to interpret zombie figures as cyphers
for exploitation generally. As Oloff and the Comaroffs stress, the zombie is a
response to shifts in the nature and configuration of capital accumulation on a
global scale. In colonial Haiti, the zombie appears with the initiation of global
capitalist relations. In contemporary Africa, these transformations are the result of
postcolonial neoliberalization, which, across the continent, has most often taken
the form of Structural Adjustment—self-imposed, in the post-apartheid context.
Throughout Africa, in other words, the neoliberal agenda is experienced as
privatization and deregulation that—by opening domestic economies to foreign
control—also effectively extends the power dynamic and material conditions
of colonial rule. Even as these measures have made vast flows of transnational
capital visible to African citizens, they have also—despite the promises of formal
decolonization—rendered wealth locally inaccessible through, for example, the
casualization of the labor market and strategic underemployment. The figure
of the undead laborer emerges amid this deepening postcolonial inequality,
registering its disorientating effects as a state of magically imposed corporeal
objectification.
Making a similar point, Stephen Shapiro has shown that “catachrestic” Gothic
figures appear in European literary production on the advent of industrialization,
as capitalist penetration violently breaks up pre-existing patterns of life.39 Oloff ’s
account of the Haitian zombie builds on this analysis, but—following Moore—
emphasizes that because capital is not only a social but a socio-ecological
formation, the experiences encoded in tales of undead workers relate to changes
in the extra-human biosphere, as well as in the organization of human lives.40 The
observation seems pertinent, too, in respect to contemporary zombie lore on the
African continent, where deleterious shifts to the labor market are unfolding
in a context Gabrielle Hecht describes as the “African Anthropocene”:41 one
characterized by intense multinational extractivism and the disproportionate
accumulation of these (and other) industries’ toxic effects. The lexicon of
heightened threat in which discourses of zombification operate might thus be
understood as registering a reality rendered acutely precarious not only by social
transformations but also by processes of environmental plunder with which
these are entangled, and, to the extent that it makes palpable the violence of these
conditions, the zombie possesses a proto-critical charge. Asserting this point,
McNally emphasizes African occult narratives’ “defetishising” potential42—their
capacity for exposing the material degradations on which capital depends. I
148 Decolonizing the Undead

would also point out, however, that the zombie addresses this violence from
within the colonial difference, and so reflects a lived experience of exclusion
from the domain of humanity. Beyond a critique of capital, zombie lore on the
African continent might thus also make possible a decolonial engagement with
the mode of being that Wynter identifies as Man. It indexes the effects of this
category from the zone of objectification that lies outside its borders, and does
so—importantly—with recourse to indigenous cosmological frameworks, thus
foregrounding the endurance of knowledge systems forcibly suppressed through
the operation of coloniality.
It is with all of this in mind that I turn now to Ntshanga’s The Reactive. Although
it does not deal explicitly with the figure of the undead laborer, this narrative
can nonetheless be understood as offering an analogous literary response to
social and environmental precarity from the vantage point of neoliberalizing
South Africa. Further, as I will show, the novel capitalizes on the critical—and
specifically decolonial—potential inherent in occult interpretations of socio-
ecological shifts, and is legible in this sense as an example of what the Warwick
Research Collective (WReC) have termed “critical irrealism” after Michael
Löwy.43 Across the novel, a dynamic of de/zombification makes visible, in the
first instance, how socio-ecological inequalities continue to be organized by the
racialized and ecocidal logic of Man, and in the second they chart the unraveling
of this logic through a reconstitution of personhood within the framework of
African animism.

Socio-Ecological Inequality and Irrealism in The Reactive

Ntshanga’s The Reactive is set in Cape Town in 2003 and presents a vision of South
Africa more generally in which the post-apartheid onset of neoliberalization
is registered as a widescale (though not total) deepening of the racialized
socioeconomic/ecological inequalities cultivated under formal white minority
rule. Though he has himself escaped the poverty into which he was born,
Nathi—the twenty-something narrator-protagonist—returns at the narrative’s
end to his family in the township of Du Noon: a place where the shacks are
described tellingly as “like time capsules.”44 Old hardships are vividly evident
here as profound poverty, but also as an attendant environmental inequality,
visible—for example—in the variegated distribution of water and sanitation
infrastructure: Nathi queues for the settlement’s communal tap and spends his
first days assisting his uncle in building a new pit latrine.
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 149

In the run-up to this concluding phase of the novel, action takes place, as Lara
Buxbaum notes, at the height of South Africa’s AIDS epidemic, before the state
roll-out of Anti-Retroviral (ARV) therapy.45 This situation is mobilized alongside
ongoing (environmental) inequality to expose an uneven access to health
care: part of the plot revolves around how Nathi—who is himself HIV positive—
sells the medication made available to him through his private insurance on the
black market. It is in this strand of the novel—which otherwise engages with
a recognizable Cape Town—that an irrealist impulse becomes visible, linking
the text to actually existing occult interpretations of conspicuous wealth amid
resilient poverty in a neoliberalizing South Africa. Tales of undead laborers, as
the Comaroffs argue, function to explain the influx of foreign capital into the
still deeply unequal post-apartheid nation; The Reactive offers an analogous
narrative of quasi-magical enrichment when a mysterious buyer makes a large
and unanticipated advance payment for a substantial order of ARVs. This is no
ordinary client; rather, he seems to enter Ntshanga’s novel from the domain of
speculative fiction. Known initially as “the ugly man,” it turns out that beneath
the tin mask he wears habitually, he has no face at all, only “skinless meat,
gleaming in full view.”46
Together with his capacity for bestowing fabulous wealth at will, the ugly
man’s disturbing and fantastically realized anonymity renders him—like posited
zombie-makers—a catachrestic symbol for the inscrutable operation of the
post-apartheid economy. In fact, he situates himself in this position when he
refers to the underground trade in ARVs as “a social service”—a comment that
both illuminates the caustic effects of privatized health care and suggests the
black market doubles official channels of (uneven) distribution.47 Later, this
connection to popular occult interpretations of inequality is affirmed: amid the
poverty of Du Noon, Nathi recounts how the community rounds on the salesman
of a pyramid scheme (another occultist response to inaccessible post-apartheid
wealth). Before he is attacked, this youth “addresses the crowd, shouting about
the coming of a man without a face. . . . He says we’ll no longer be slaves, when
the faceless man comes.”48

Zombie Aesthetics

Against this backdrop of bewildering socio-ecological precarity, the narrative

follows Nathi and his friends Ruan and Cecilia (Cissie) as they drift through
their days in a state of drug- and alcohol-fueled lethargy. Midway through
150 Decolonizing the Undead

the novel, it is revealed that the protagonist’s HIV status is the result of self-
infection, performed in the virology lab where he has worked, as an attempt to
manage his grief over his brother Luthando’s death. The fatality of Nathi’s action
looms large in the story from the outset. The three friends often play “Last Life,”
for example: a game in which they imagine Nathi’s “last year on the planet.”49
Existing so explicitly in the force-field of his own mortality, Nathi exemplifies a
kind of living death, and Cecelia makes this point overtly when she reminds him
that “flesh is . . . meant to go off from the beginning.”50 Across the narrative, this
sense of an impending end is expanded in an ecological register, as the characters
regularly contemplate the destruction of the earth’s biosphere. This catastrophic
ecological vision appears inflected by the AIDS crisis, when in a telling moment
Nathi relates “how the Earth was gutted open with so many new graves for
paupers, that when the clouds parted, they revealed a view . . . that looked like a
giant honeycomb.”51 Combining the social effects of neoliberalization with the
language of extractivism, these lines offer a perspective on the world-ecology
from the South African vantage, highlighting the uneven post-apartheid
distribution of both social and ecological vulnerability. Further, though, they
resonate in their apocalypticism with the protagonist’s own approaching death,
augmenting this so that all the characters in the narrative come to live in the
shadow of biospheric collapse.
This infiltration of life by death is underscored, on the one hand, as Nathi
self-medicates in a way that deadens his emotions, and on the other through
an aesthetics of embodiment, which overemphasizes a form of objectified
physicality. Introducing himself and his friends, and adopting the dispassionately
descriptive register that is characteristic of his narration more generally, Nathi
recounts his daily routine:

Like always, the three of us . . . wake up sometime before noon and take two
ibuprofens each. Then we go back to sleep, wake up again an hour later, and take
another two from the 800-milligram pack. Then Cissie turns on the stove to
cook up a batch of glue, and the three of us wander around mutely after that . . .
caroming off each other’s limbs.52

As it subordinates psychic experience to the actions and positioning of the

material body, the passage articulates the anesthetizing effect of the chemicals
the characters imbibe, but it also gestures toward a peculiarly reified form of
subjectivity. Indeed, Ntshanga’s vision of the three friends as silent bodies that,
atom-like, ricochet off one another subliminally recalls Hollywood scenes of
the shambling undead. This connection is rendered more palpable still when,
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 151

high on “Industrial” (glue), Nathi appears in the zombie’s signature stance, his
consciousness overtly reduced to a series of mechanical impulses: “my mind
instructs me to glide,” he tells, “so I push my arms out . . . balancing with my
hands and trying not to slip.”53

­Zombification and the Coloniality of Being

Together with the detached tone of Nathi’s first-person narration, the novel’s
persistent prioritization of corporeal materiality over emotive life coheres as
an aesthetics of zombification, which—like African occult discourses around
the undead—can be understood as conveying a subjective experience of
objectification. This state of being is linked to the characters’ drug use, but is
also situated in relation to the colonial difference. It is important in this sense
that Nathi feels “scrutinised . . . and inadequate” in his job at the lab, where his
colleagues have “skin that could flush red,” and where his boss—a French AIDS
researcher with an “oblige noblesse”—perceives the protagonist as “just another
of his Africans.”54 Considered in this context, the sense of reified physicality
that pervades Nathi’s narrative resonates with Frantz Fanon’s famous account
of racialization as effecting “[a] slow composition of my self as a body.”55
Fanon’s point is that, because racist dehumanization is woven into the fabric of
Eurocentric knowledge and culture, the paradigm of selfhood constituted within
these parameters can only ever provide colonized peoples with a “third person
consciousness,” in which one relates to oneself as, in Fanon’s words, “an object in
the midst of other objects.”56 Taking place in a scientific institution, Nathi’s sense
of alienation—his apprehension of his position in the colonial difference—
speaks directly to the racialized principle encoded in hegemonized Eurocentric
epistemology, the social and ecological effects of which the narrative has traced
elsewhere as post-apartheid neoliberalization is shown to entrench the human
and environmental inequity instantiated under white minority rule.
Ultimately, Nathi’s drug use can be understood as what Fanon himself calls
an “immunization of the emotions” in the face of violent objectification.57
Most immediately, however, it is tied to Luthando’s death, which occurs after
the ceremonial circumcision through which young Xhosa men are initiated
into adulthood. Nathi feels responsible for this tragedy, having not fulfilled
his promise to accompany his brother in the ritual. For Ronit Frenkel, the
protagonist’s guilt and grief over this situation operate primarily on an
interpersonal level.58 However, it seems important that Luthando’s memory is
152 Decolonizing the Undead

also linked overtly to the psychic effects of apartheid race politics, a connection
made explicit when he angrily tells Nathi that “everything . . . about [him] was
white.”59 The incident resonates with a later moment, when the protagonist
recounts how his estrangement from Xhosa culture is heightened by elders who
treat him “like anyone else—not a Model C who didn’t know his clan name from
his asshole.”60 Significantly, Nathi’s allusion here locates his feeling of cultural
alienation as the effect of institutionalized coloniality: post-apartheid Model
C schools—where he is educated—were formerly reserved for white pupils,
and have recently been critiqued for their covert perpetuation of apartheid’s
cultural politics.61 The wider field of associations in which Luthando is situated
thus suggests that as the protagonist’s drug-use numbs the loss of his brother, it
can also be understood as a response to the racialized culture in which Nathi
gains his sense of self. Narcotic-fueled lethargy thus overlays and compounds
the aesthetic of corporeal objectification via which the narrative articulates the
experience of material and epistemic relegation from what Wynter has described
as the category of Man.

Decolonizing the Human: Reactivity

Self-induced detachment is not, however, the protagonist’s only recourse. Indeed,

the act of slow suicide on which the narrative turns is framed as an attempted
escape from numbness. “I infected myself with HIV,” Nathi explains; “That’s
how I became reactive. . . . I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from.”62
Buxbaum proposes that Nathi’s “infection is his method of forcing the experience
of vulnerability on himself.”63 In the radically uneven context of post-apartheid
South Africa, vulnerability is, as Buxbaum notes, a systemically produced
“passive state,”64 but she argues further that, under these conditions, acts of
self-imposed risk in fictional narrative contest passivity by affirming the lively
interdependency of existence. “[B]y actively risking vulnerability,” she writes,
characters “relinquish an attachment to embodied subjectivity as hermetically
sealed off from others and the world.”65 Viewed in this light, Nathi’s exposure to
the HIV virus becomes a strategy for addressing the experience of objectification
in the colonial difference, and one that—unlike self-medication—does not
reinforce a condition of inertia and alienation.
Reactivity can thus be read as figuring a mode of existence not shaped by
the paradigm of coloniality. In fact, Ntshanga’s novel frequently calls the self-
evidence of the human into question: Ruan wants to upload his consciousness,
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 153

for example, and Cissie believes the destruction of the individual is sufficient
for the end of the world. It is against this interrogative background, and
following immediately on from the account of self-infection, that Nathi leaves
Cape Town for Du Noon to undergo the initiation he has been avoiding since
Luthando’s death—a choice through which, as Frenkel notes, “Ntshanga offers
traditional Southern African rituals and belief systems as a recourse.”66 Indeed,
the significance of Xhosa cosmology is accentuated by the role of Nosizi—a
diviner—on whose prompting the protagonist is brought back to partake in
the ceremony. For Frenkel, initiation catalyzes “a sort of transformative healing
process for Nathi,”67 and the specific form this takes in the narrative is a shift
in the protagonist’s sense of self and his relation to the world. This is evidenced
most vividly by his embarking on a new relationship immediately after his
initiation. His connection with Esona is instant; the two feel from the outset
as if they are “forehead to forehead.”68 As Buxbaum points out, the novel’s
final sex scene emphasizes this mutual intimacy, articulating a vibrancy of
sensation that contrasts with Nathi’s former numbness (“her fingernails tickle
my underside like the tip of an ivy leaf ”)69 while also expressing a sense of
subjective “dissolution”70 as Nathi experiences orgasm as a “melt[ing]” into the
body of his partner.71 Buxbaum argues that the encounter affirms the subjective
interdependence introduced into the narrative via Nathi’s reactive status. It
is important also, however, that this model of the self is concretized through
the protagonist’s formal initiation into Xhosa society, and thus gains a cultural
inflection.
As the Comaroffs have shown, personhood is precisely understood as
relational in the context of African belief systems, predicated as these are—
Garuba argues—on an animist principle. Viewed in this light, the mode of being
Nathi occupies at the close of the novel can be understood not only as a revision
of an objectifying racialized paradigm but more specifically as a decolonization of
this paradigm’s conception of the human. Ntshanga’s narrative both maps out the
material and epistemic effects of Wynter’s principle of Man and reconfigures the
categories through which this operates, in a way that re-centers the cosmology of
those expelled from humanity proper into the colonial difference. The relational
mode of being that emerges is apparent in Nathi’s relationship with Esona; but
Xhosa culture is also shown to provide a perspective on extra-human nature,
which emphasizes socio-ecological interdependency through spiritualization.
Nathi recalls how, as a child in his grandmother’s village, he learned of animal
spirits “with bodies tall as men,” and how in this place he also acquired “the idea
that the natural world was without borders.”72
154 Decolonizing the Undead

Conclusion: De/Zombification

I have argued that Ntshanga mobilizes an aesthetics of zombification to convey

the subjective experience of objectification under socio-ecological conditions of
post-apartheid coloniality—a narrative strategy that resonates with the figures
of dehumanization circulating through popular African discourses of the occult.
Rather than unraveling the subject-object divide (as in Lauro and Embry’s
posthumanist analysis), this zombie aesthetic registers the persistence of the
human as a mechanism for organizing social and ecological relations. It is worth
noting, too, that the affirmation of a Xhosa worldview implicit in The Reactive
further sets Ntshanga’s account apart from Lauro and Embry’s, which—we will
recall—hinges on the total efficacy of (colonial) capital’s cultural and epistemic
impositions. Rooted in Xhosa culture, the personhood on which Ntshanga’s
novel ends is resistant to universalization; as a result, the text reconfigures Man
in a way that refuses the violent overrepresentation characteristic of this category
in Eurocentric discourse.
Thus, The Reactive’s decolonization of the human does not emerge from
the novel’s zombie aesthetic itself; it takes place instead as the logic of
objectification is redressed through Nathi’s initiation. Indeed, to the extent
that—as Frenkel writes—the ceremony marks the protagonist’s decision “to
live,”73 Nathi’s re-engagement with Xhosa cosmology functions—literally—
to distance the impending end of his life. After the ritual is complete, Nathi
learns of his uncharacteristically strong defensive response to the virus: “I was
still reactive,” he explains, “just slow to develop the syndrome.”74 The threat
of death—in the shadow of which he has appeared zombie-like across the
text—is thus tempered, and coinciding with this development, his initiation
into Xhosa personhood functions as a critical de-zombifying event: a key
moment in the trajectory of the plot, which brings the protagonist—and by
extension also extra-human nature—out of a state of objecthood produced
through coloniality, and into a fuller, more vibrant form of life. This
narrative turn suggests that, from the historical vantage of those relegated
from the domain of Man, the consciousless, objectified body of the zombie
cannot function as a critical figure for thinking beyond the human, but
only replicates the negation of subjectivity on which the human depends
for its coherence. To dismantle this category requires instead a sensitivity
to its failures—to the forms of being and knowing that endure even after its
violent imposition.
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 155

Notes

1 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 268.

2 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial
Freedom,” 167.
3 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 127.
4 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa,” 485.
5 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa,” 492.
6 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa,” 485.
7 Ntshanga, The Reactive.
8 Wynter, “Unsettling,” 288.
9 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience,” 160.
10 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” 533.
11 Wynter, “Unsettling,” 267.
12 Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” 89.
13 Moore, “Introduction,” 4.
14 Moore, “Capitalocene and Planetary Justice,” 54.
15 Moore, “Capitalocene and Planetary Justice,” 54.
16 Moore, “Capitalocene and Planetary Justice,” 54.
17 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 88.
18 Nayar, Posthumanism, 9.
19 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 95.
20 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 96.
21 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 108, emphasis in original.
22 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 95.
23 Wynter, “Unsettling,” 260.
24 Nayar, Posthumanism, 11.
25 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 172.
26 Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 94.
27 Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 58.
28 Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing,” 133.
29 Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing,” 132.
30 Oloff, “Greening the Zombie,” 33.
31 Oloff, “Greening the Zombie,” 34.
32 Ackermann and Gauthier, “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” 490.
33 Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism,” 267.
34 Comaroff and Comaroff, “On Personhood,” 273.
35 Comaroff and Comaroff, “On Personhood,” 275.
36 Comaroff and Comaroff, “On Personhood,” 275.
156 Decolonizing the Undead

37 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 788.

38 McNally, Monster of the Market, 201.
39 Shapiro, “Transvaal/Transylvania,” 31.
40 Oloff, “Greening the Zombie,” 33–4.
41 Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene,” 109.
42 McNally, Monsters, 204, emphasis in original.
43 Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development, 83.
44 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 165.
45 Buxbaum, “Risking Intimacy in Contemporary South African Fiction,” 527.
46 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 94.
47 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 95.
48 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 177.
49 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 19.
50 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 21.
51 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 148–9.
52 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 10.
53 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 29.
54 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 132.
55 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.
56 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82.
57 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 85.
58 Frenkel, “Post-Liberation Temporalities,” 75–6.
59 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 100.
60 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 160.
61 Christie and McKinney, “Decoloniality and ‘Model C’ Schools,” 1–2.
62 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 161.
63 Buxbaum, “Risking Intimacy,” 526.
64 Buxbaum, “Risking Intimacy,” 525.
65 Buxbaum, “Risking Intimacy,” 525.
66 Frenkel, “Post-Liberation Temporalities,” 76.
67 Frenkel, “Post-Liberation Temporalities,” 76.
68 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 183.
69 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 184.
70 Buxbaum, “Risking Intimacy,” 526.
71 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 184.
72 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 113.
73 Frenkel, “Post-Liberation Temporalities,” 77.
74 Ntshanga, The Reactive, 179.
 De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique 157

Works Cited

Ackermann, Hans-W. and Jeanine Gauthier. “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi.”
Journal of American Folklore 104, no. 414 (1991): 466–94.
Buxbaum, Lara. “Risking Intimacy in Contemporary South African Fiction.” Textual
Practice 31, no. 3 (2017): 523–36.
Christie, Pam and Caroline McKinney. “Decoloniality and ‘Model C’ Schools: Ethos,
Language and the Protests of 2016.” Education as Change 21, no. 3 (2017): 1–21.
Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and
Millennial Capitalism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 779–805.
Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. “On Personhood: An Anthropological
Perspective from Africa.” Social Identities 7, no. 2 (2001): 267–83.
Deckard, Sharae et al. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of
World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann.
London: Pluto, [1952] 2008.
Frenkel, Ronit. “Post-Liberation Temporalities, Utopian Afterlives and Three South
African Novels by Masande Ntshanga, Mohale Mashigo and Niq Mhlongo.” English
Studies in Africa 62, no. 1 (2019): 70–80.
Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing
African, Literature, Culture and Society.” Public Culture 15, no. 2 (2003): 261–85.
Hecht, Gabrielle. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste,
Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–41.
Lauro Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition
in the Era Advanced Capitalism.” boundary 2 35, no. 1 (2008): 85–108.
McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism.
Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011.
Mignolo, Walter D. “Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (2002): 57–96.
Mignolo, Walter D. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial
Freedom.” Theory Culture & Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 159–81.
Mignolo, Walter D. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border
Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience.” Conferno 1, no. 1 (2013): 129–50.
Mignolo, Walter D. and Catherine Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
­Moore, Jason W. “Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and
the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the
Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 1–13. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.
Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature,
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78–115. Oakland:
PM Press, 2016.
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Moore, Jason W. “Capitalocene and Planetary Justice.” Maize 6 (2019): 49–54.

Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. London: Polity, 2014.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa.” History Compass 13,
no. 3 (2015): 485–96.
Ntshanga, Masande. The Reactive. London: Jacaranda, 2014.
Oloff, Kerstin. “‘Greening’ the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation.” Green Letters 16, no. 1 (2012): 31–45.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla:
Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80.
Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal/Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic
Periodicity.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 29–47.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards
the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” The New Centennial
Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 157–337.
 ­1 0

Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural

Entanglement: Ahmed Saadawi’s
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Netty Mattar

The Whatsitsname (from the Iraqi Arabic word shesma) in Ahmed Saadawi’s
Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) is a creature caught between life and death.
Its rotting body emerges from the rubble and ruins of houses and buildings
pummeled by the bombings that wreck Baghdad. A body emptied of its soul, the
Whatsitsname is a figure of exile that lurks on the edges of the city, compelled
by supernatural forces to kill its inhabitants. It is thus inherently tethered to
Baghdad while simultaneously driven out of it. Saadawi’s monster resembles
the abject figure of the zombie, more specifically, the enslaved zombie of the
American imaginary. The enslaved-style zombie is a soulless body under
the control of another, a creature that must be contained and eradicated.1 The
Whatsitsname and the enslaved-style zombie share a crucial quality: they are
radical figures of unbelonging, their attachments to place2 severed, and yet they
are bound to the lands they are no longer a part of. Theirs is a violent paradox
of landlessness that constitutes their identity, and they wander the earth in a
perpetual state of nonarrival.
The enslaved-style zombie we see in American popular culture is based on
stories connected to Haitian vodou and folklore, but is essentially an American
creation.3 Popular depictions ignore the nuances of vodou belief,4 appropriating
Haitian folklore and turning the zombie into a “convenient boogeyman”5 that
has come to represent various cultural anxieties.6 This enslaved-style zombie is
greatly influenced by the writing of William Seabrook, an American journalist
and explorer, who lived in Haiti and returned to the United States with detailed
and sensationalistic accounts of the walking dead. His book, The Magic Island
(1927), which became a primary source for early versions of the zombie in
160 Decolonizing the Undead

America, offers stories of “soulless human corpse[s]. . . taken from the grave
and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life,” transformed into
mindless beings forced to labor on the fields or to commit crimes.7 The subjective
absence of the zombie evokes in the onlooker not only horror but “pit[y].”8
Seabrook establishes in the American imagination the idea of the zombie as
both a monster and a victim, which becomes deeply entwined with perceptions
of Haiti. Seabrook’s accounts, and the zombie narratives it has inspired such as
“Zombie” (1932) and White Zombie (1932), thus erase the complex histories
surrounding the Haitian conceptions. In the Haitian context, for example, the
zombie is connected to the violent history of enslaved people forcibly sent by
ship to the sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean from sub-Saharan Africa.9
However, following the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804),10 the zombie has also
come to signify liberation from enslavement through rebellion and overcoming
oppression. American appropriations typically detach the zombie figure from
such subversive power.
The zombie did not enter Western popular culture by way of a well-known
literary tradition11 and so Western audiences do not have very rigid expectations
of the monster. Writers and filmmakers are free to experiment with and modify
the zombie.12 In American narratives, the zombie has therefore been associated
with a variety of fears including cannibalism (Night of the Living Dead, 1968),
disease (28 Days Later, 2002), and rapid migration (World War Z, 2013). It is a
shifting signifier, broadly signaling unbelonging and the loss of subjectivity, but
also absorbing meanings that different artists impose upon it. This quality has
enabled its use as a tool of American imperialism.

Zombies and Empire

The enslaved-style zombie arrives in America around the same time as the
American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.13 The United States had
justified its invasion by pointing to Haiti’s political instability and to the United
States’ role in restoring order. However, scholars argue that this was part of a
strategy for expanding US imperial territory, an agenda established by the
Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which essentially asserts America’s dominance and its
right to intervene anywhere in the world.14 US military intervention into foreign
lands expands the American empire through the establishment of a global
network of military bases. According to Daniel Immerwahr (2019), these points
“serve as staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons and laboratories,”
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 161

extensions of American territory that make up its “pointillist empire.” The

hundreds of points around the world that are the foundation of this empire
reflect a radically different relationship to territory that has allowed the nation to
hide its imperial expansion.15 The US occupation of Haiti was connected to US
control of Haiti’s economy and of its territory as a strategic military location.16
Jennifer Fay (2008) describes how the dispossession of the Haitian people as well
as the revival of the colonial and slaver economy during the US occupation is
connected to the enslaved-style zombie that had begun to circulate in American
culture. The images of dehumanized monsters seen in films like White Zombie
(1932) functioned as propaganda justifying the occupation.17
What is of interest to me is how the enslaved-style zombie trope has been
redeployed in relation to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003–
11). The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of “liberating” it, a
move widely recognized today as furthering the neocolonial project of securing
Middle Eastern oil.18 In the lead-up to the invasion, the US Secretary of State for
Defense accused former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein of stockpiling “zombie
gas,” a chemical agent apparently capable of leaving victims disoriented and in
a “zombie-like state.” This accusation was meant to strengthen support for US
military intervention in Iraq.19 The film 28 Weeks Later (2007) similarly likens
Iraqis to zombies by imagining a zombie outbreak outside of a US-occupied
Green Zone in London, a clear reference to the Green Zone in Iraq (also known
as “Little America”) captured by American forces in 2003. The implication is
that the Iraqi people are monsters that will kill everyone if they are not contained
and killed first. The zombie therefore recurs as a racist trope in essentializing
narratives that serve to justify the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent reordering
of its society.
The striking connection between these narratives of Haiti and Iraq is indicative
of a binary paradigm of race that undergirds US history and its territorial
expansion. This paradigm conflates all “others,” assimilating differences in order
to erase them. This conflation is clear in the memoir Black Baghdad (1933),
which is about the US occupation of Haiti. The text deliberately frames Haiti
through the same orientalist lens used to frame Iraq, describing it as a place from
“the days of the Arabian Nights” where you can see “woolly-headed cannibals
and silk-hatted savants side by side.”20 The connection of Haiti and Iraq through
the figure of the zombie in later narratives highlights the continuing project
of American imperial expansion: the enslaved-style zombie functions to strip
away the humanity of a people, marking them as both monsters and victims,
dispossessing them of their attendant rights to their property and land, which
162 Decolonizing the Undead

facilitates the takeover of territory, the main strategic motivation of the US

empire. Grafted onto multiple others, the zombie is a flexible schematic that fixes
the boundaries of Western ontology, reinforcing reductive self/other dualisms
that determine the superiority of the Western self, positioning all “others” as
inferior outsiders. This obscures the specific historical events surrounding each
context and directs our attention away from the United States’ role as perpetrator
in the occupation of Haiti and Iraq.
The Whatsitsname, as I have suggested, evokes the enslaved-style zombie in
that it is a menacing, undead creature with no soul or consciousness of its own
in the Western sense. However, there are significant differences in Saadawi’s
iteration that interfere with these popular conceptions, particularly in the
nature of its embodiment and its entanglements with inhabitants and with the
city it moves through, as I will demonstrate. I argue that the Whatsitsname
is a conscious attempt to express Iraqi solidarity with the Haitian oppressed,
acknowledging a common experience of unbelonging, while at the same time
introducing particular histories and memories that differentiate experiences
and trouble assumptions about the other. In this way, Saadawi creates a
transcultural figuration of the zombie that extends beyond facile and reductive
conceptions. From a transcultural perspective, cultures and their symbolic
systems “interfere” with other cultures in dynamic and multidirectional ways.21
Cultures inhabit other cultures, enabling them to move beyond the presumed
rigidity of cultural identities and the oppositional binaries these might entail.
Differences are brought together, and there is a continuous negotiation of
identity. These interactions of differences create new transcultural identities
that exist at the border of, and beyond, any specific culture. Fixed identities
are deconstructed and new creative possibilities enabled without losing
specificities and without fusing identities into unified wholes.22 This leads to
the “proliferation of interpretive possibilities” and “unrestricted semantic play
set free from any one signified,” enabling “new signifiables” without “negating
the ‘signified.’”23 Understanding the Whatsitsname as a creative possibility
enabled by transcultural interference adds nuance to decolonial approaches.
This perspective deconstructs European paradigms that divide, categorize, and
segregate, paradigms that have long defined and confined the nations of the
so-called Third World. By attending to the interactions and flows that bind the
dispossessed of Haiti and Iraq, we can extend the study of Iraqi literature beyond
national borders and attempt to place Iraqi history and culture in a global
perspective that overturns cultural separatism, transcending the delineations
of European enclosures.
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 163

Embodied Cartographies of Expulsion

Saadawi plays with the image of the zombie in order to destabilize its ontological
boundaries. This is seen clearly in the Whatsitsname’s body, which, unlike early
Americanized zombies, is an “extraordinary composite—made up of disparate
body parts”24 from multiple corpses that are stitched together haphazardly.
Throughout the novel, Saadawi draws our attention to the “fissures” where
things are “coming apart,”25 and to how the boundaries between parts rupture
or “turn into liquid.”26 This results in pieces of flesh falling off, leaving “large
holes,”27 necessitating a constant replacement and restitching of parts. The focus
on these fissures brings to mind the ongoing dividing up and stitching together
of Iraq resulting from the long history of colonial intervention and violence,
and the tenuousness of these boundaries. This connection is provoked by the
frame narrative, which describes the administration of Iraqi territory by US
military intelligence, which, in turn, echoes European colonialism in its attempt
to control the territory and reconstruct its cultural system. The surveillance unit
clamps down on “unusual” activity related to “astrologers and fortune-tellers”
and suppresses “urban legends, and superstitious rumors,”28 rationalizing events
and then archiving and documenting these occurrences, activities that function,
according to Foucault (1969), as the discursive means of Western political
enforcement.
Iraq is a place defined, in modern times, by such colonial enforcement. For
centuries, the land we now know as Iraq had been a “permeable cross-cultural
passage” where people of different ethnicities and religions lived together in
cities, maintaining trade and community connections.29 Britain created the
modern state of Iraq by carving up the land and cobbling together the Ottoman
provinces of Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad, establishing borders that were not there.
The ancient nomadic flows were replaced by exclusionary and hostile policies.30
The abstract borders of Iraq constitute a forcible carving out of political space
from the outside, which violently cut people off from communities they had
long been part of. Communities were further reconfigured when the British
reinvented the government, endorsing Sunni politicians and ignoring the other
communities, giving rise to ethnic and religious tensions.31 These tensions
materialized into physical divisions when the United States invaded the nation.
Under US policies, the land was carved up once again, resulting in a Sunni west,
a Kurdish north, and a Shi’a south. Sectarian identities solidified as concrete
walls and checkpoints were erected.32 Kinship gave way to religious cleansing,
and to a long and violent period of insurgency.33 Military and sectarian violence
164 Decolonizing the Undead

progressively forced Iraqis out of their homes, destroying historic buildings and
landmarks, creating in Iraq a state of imminent expulsion.
The Whatsitsname is born in the aftermath of this colonial division. Its body
is a result of this constant state of expulsion and the annihilation of the city
that comes with it. From the moment the story begins, we are confronted with
a picture of the utter destruction of the city. The story begins with a “massive
explosion” in Tayaran Square, a busy place of gathering in the center of Baghdad.
Saadawi emphasizes that the destruction of place is also the destruction of the
Iraqi people, and we witness the collapse of buildings alongside heaps of maimed
bodies. This opening moment establishes a pattern of incessant violence in the
novel: car bombs explode with alarming regularity in a “cycle of killing”;34 death
is often gratuitous, transforming Baghdad into a “festival of death.”35 The novel
conveys a picture of “place annihilation” that positions cities as not simply the
backdrop for war but the very targets of violence. Here, the aim is to destroy
not only buildings and infrastructure but also cultures and their expressions,
and thus the civilian populations that reside within, such that the destruction of
place and the eradication of its people cannot be seen as separate.36 The weight of
human loss is signaled by Saadawi through absence. Amid the chaos, characters
remember the spaces of communal support and inter-religious harmony that
have been destroyed, and the sons and daughters now “dispersed around the
world.” The absence of life is emphasized by grim traces of “blood and hair”
smeared on electricity poles.37 This absence creates a tension that brings into
sharp relief the visceral picture of immanent dispossession.
The profound emotional toll of this violent instability is apparent in Hadi,
the junk dealer, one of several central characters who must cope with imminent
loss. Hadi is a troubled drunkard who is fixated on the traces of bloodshed on
the streets of Baghdad. For Hadi, the explosion in Tayaran Square—the “smoke,
the burning of plastic and seat cushions, the roasting of human flesh”38—triggers
traumatic memories of his own loss, particularly the death of his closest friend,
Nahem, who died in a similar explosion in Karrada months earlier. Hadi reacts
to the destruction he witnesses through acts of reclamation. He collects body
parts that remain at various bombing sites all over Baghdad, tearing them from
the wreckage, just as he had tried to peel Nahem’s flesh from the streets.39 Hadi
is prompted to assemble these parts into a “massive corpse” in hopes that these
body parts are not forgotten or “treated as rubbish,” and instead, “respected
like other dead people and given a proper burial.”40 For Hadi, who sews these
remnants together within the ruins of his half-demolished home, these remains
are material testimonies of the horrors of unplacement. The corpse he assembles,
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 165

which he calls the Whatsitsname, is thus born of destruction and division. The
Whatsitsname unexpectedly awakens only to continue this cycle of violence,
exacting revenge on “all those who did violence to those whose body parts [it
is] made of.”41
It becomes clear to the reader that, although sectarian violence rips through
the city, Saadawi’s zombie is a figure engendered in the US occupation of
Iraq. Early in the novel, the 2003 US invasion of Baghdad is likened to “Death
stalk[ing] the city, like a plague,”42 a description that foreshadows the appearance
of the Whatsitsname. The very first time the Whatsitsname is seen, watching
the living from the shadows, we hear the “roar of American Apache helicopters
flying overhead.”43 Later in the novel we are told that people believe that “it was
the Americans who were behind this monster.”44 The insidious violence of the
American military is felt throughout the novel. Saadawi reiterates that the citizens
of Baghdad are “frightened by the Americans” who “operate[e] with considerable
independence” and “no one could hold them to account for what they did.”45 The
zombie is therefore historicized within these multiple contexts, ensuring that
readers understand dispossession within the larger macrohistorical backdrop,
thus making colonial violence visible. Saadawi’s zombie is not simply the source
of death and horror but rather also an embodiment of colonial repercussions.
This interference serves to differentiate the Iraqi zombie from other versions,
disrupting the reductive category of the non-Western other and unsettling
colonial paradigms. In addition, its difference from the enslaved-style zombies
connected to Haiti highlights the historical vacuum surrounding American
appropriations of Haitian culture.
Significantly, Saadawi repositions the status of the zombie from radical
outsider to being ontologically entangled with others around it. In other words,
the meaning of the Whatsitsname is not fixed but continually redefined in its
encounters with others. For example, in Sadr City it is “a Wahhabi,” in Adamiya
a “Shiite extremist,” and to the Americans, it is a terrorist.46 To Elishva, the old
Assyrian Christian who is believed to have spiritual powers,47 the Whatsitsname
represents something hopeful. Elishva is the first to see the Whatsitsname hiding
in the shadows. Believing that this might be her son, who had disappeared in the
Iran-Iraq war, she invites it into her home and “[brings] him out of anonymity,
with the name she [gives] him: Daniel.”48 This wretched creature becomes in
her eyes an object of love, whom she clothes and feeds. Elishva shares with the
monster the story of how her family had all left once the “demons had broken
out of their dungeons” after the invasion. She tells the monster how she had
“refused to leave her home” insisting that it “wasn’t good that everyone should
166 Decolonizing the Undead

leave the country” and that things had been bad before but they “had stayed . . .
and had survived.”49 The zombie here, while still a figure of malice, no longer
evokes either pity or fear. Instead, its subjective lack allows Elishva to reconstruct
the parameters of her experience, opening up a space for an alternative history,
centered on resilience in the face of brutality, which problematizes univocal
versions of Iraq’s past and the victim status of its people, signaling again the
insufficiency of colonizing logic. The Whatsitsname also becomes a figure of
longing upon which Elishva projects a desire for a place and time that is no
longer there. Given the name of Elishva’s missing son, the Whatsitsname
represents a transhistorical reconstruction of home and a return to the past. This
return is also a refusal to submit to the fixed notions of progressive time and
passive space that underpin deterministic, modern ideas of history rooted in
the Enlightenment. It draws attention to a conception of space and time that is
being erased. The zombie’s lack is thus resignified as a site of active restoration
of identity, a survival strategy in the face of expulsion. However, the fact that
Elishva confuses the corpse for Daniel, and her unwillingness to see its face
for what it is (“she would see only what she wanted to see”50), seems to convey
anxiety about the possibility that such acts of restoration and remembrance are
mere nostalgia, and that the imagined home longed for was never truly real.
Unlike the enslaved-zombie of Seabrook’s accounts, where the horror
originates from the absence of subjectivity, here the horror lies in the
Whatsitsname’s body rotting and leaking. Gruesome descriptions of the corpse’s
body permeate the text. There are frequent descriptions of putrefaction, of
“viscous liquids, light in colour, oozing” from cuts, and “piece[s] of flesh” that
“won’t stay in place . . . all runny” and “start[ing] to melt.”51 Unable to look away,
our attention is fixed on corporeality, particularly on where things are coming
apart, and on the flesh and excretions beneath. These oozing edges are the sites
of pain, sites of splitting. Saadawi shifts the source of horror to the abject. As
Julia Kristeva (1982) explains, the abject is everything that reminds us of our
own corporeal state. The corpse, open wounds, and excrement, for instance, are
materials that are neither subject nor object, and that “distur[b] identity, system,
order.”52 The abject other causes disgust and provokes the desire to expel these
materials as waste. The abject is linked to violence as the instinct to expel and
purge waste is a violent energy the body directs upon itself.53 Diverting from
early depictions of the enslaved-style zombie in this way, Saadawi is able to
suggest, on one level, how the Iraqi has been constructed as abject, to be kept
out of the sphere of moral obligations and human and social rights, which thus
maintains the boundary between Western “self ” and Iraqi “other.” As the zombie
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 167

body is an alternative mapping of Iraqi space, as I have suggested, the attention

to corporeal splitting also emphasizes that placelessness in Iraq is defined by the
traumatic and painful tearing apart of the Iraqi people through the wounding
of their land. The fact that the monstrous body’s traumatic splitting involves the
remains of multiple subjects sutured together suggests that Baghdad’s wounding
moves between bodies, and is both an individual experience and a collective
one. As Cathy Caruth reminds us, “history like trauma is never simply one’s
own” but is “precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”54 What
is significant here is the fact that the Whatsitsname is intent on continually
replacing parts that rot and fall off with new parts, stitching them in, until they
too fall out, in a continuing cycle of pain. This emphasizes how the experience
of placelessness, of being tied to a place while being violently expelled from it,
is a desired state, a willful returning to the moment of pain, a constant return to
the traumatic past.
This willful return to the traumatic past is a kind of paralysis that has
dangerous implications. It is not to a past comfort, as Elishva’s yearning is. It
is a return to a site of catastrophe and disorder, to trauma that is re-enacted
through the cycle of killing and replacing parts. These re-enactments represent
the continual, compulsive intrusion of the past into the present. Impelled by
the grief and prayers of victims, the Whatsitsname enacts a version of justice
by taking “revenge on all the criminals” so that the “poor” souls of Baghdad
“no longer need to wait in agony for [it] to come.”55 Operating outside of the
law, it kills mercenaries, extremists, and even beggars and security guards, as
long as they are guilty of some harm.56 It realizes that the desire to seek revenge
through killing will never end: “Nothing in me lasts long, other than the desire
to keep going. I kill in order to keep going” and this is its “only justification.”57
The Whatsitsname is therefore both victim and perpetrator, both master and
enslaved, and this in-betweenness is something that Saadawi does not resolve.
This constitutes an estrangement of the zombie figure, revealing that Iraqi
identity cannot be confined within binary structures, and suggests that identities
are more fluid than assumed and therefore can be changed.
The Whatsitsname represents the dark side of testifying to trauma, when the
preoccupation with the pain of dispossession reifies both injury and injustice.
And as we see with Whatsitsname’s followers, different groups will use this
trauma to advance different agendas. One group sees it as the “first true Iraq
citizen” as its body is an “impossible mix” of diverse ethnic, racial, tribal groups
“that was never achieved in the past”; the second believes it to be the apocalyptic
“instrument of mass destruction” and instrument of divine justice; and the third
168 Decolonizing the Undead

group believes the Whatsitsname is “the savior” himself, and by following it,
they will share in its “immortality.”58 Whatever the justification or cause, the
mission for each disparate group is “essentially to kill, to kill new people every
day.”59 Saadawi suggests that fixating on past trauma in this way only allows for
unity on political grounds predicated on vengeance and killing.
The more the Whatsitsname kills, the less clarity it has about “who
should be killed or why,”60 because, it realizes, there are “no innocents who
are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”61 In the
end it recognizes that in killing, it is simply “ensuring his own survival.”62
This is the paradoxical nature of revenge, where the restoration of power
comes with the intensification of violence and the diminution of meaning.
The impulse to repeat harm can be connected to Sigmund Freud’s notion of
melancholia, which Freud distinguishes from mourning. According to Freud
(1917), mourning is “regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to
the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s
country, liberty, and ideal, and so on,” and the mourner is eventually able to
relinquish their attachment to the object, becoming free to attach itself to new
objects. Mourning risks turning into melancholia, a pathological state where
the person is not able to let go of the lost object, integrating the loss into the
self, continuously returning to it, stuck in a cycle of self-loathing and unable
to resolve their grief.63 Fixated on pain, the Whatsitsname further fractures
a broken city, so that the landscape resembles his patchwork body to an
increasing extent. Just as this zombie repeatedly carves up people to replenish
its butchered body in order to keep going, it re-creates Baghdad in its image in
order to sustain itself. In the end, Baghdad becomes a city its people can “no
longer recogniz[e].” It is as if the “city had abandoned [them], becoming a place
of murder and gratuitous violence.”64
Frankenstein in Baghdad is a novel that conveys the complexities of
decolonization. Saadawi’s zombie embodies both the possibilities of undoing
colonial structures and the challenges Iraqis face being bound to the very
violence that has destroyed the Iraqi people. The novel conveys how efforts to
break free from colonial oppression have often led to the use of the same tools of
colonial oppression to serve revolutionary action.65 In the novel, these structures
of mastery are turned inward and reflect how, in Iraq, acts of liberation constitute
self-injury where fellow citizens are objectified and seen as parts to be used in a
game of domination. The zombie here symbolizes the variety of ways in which
the colonial past, in its various political and ideological forms, continues to
inhabit the present, resulting in an agonizing self-imposed paralysis. At the end
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 169

of the novel, a character, being slowly squeezed to death by the Whatsitsname,

looks into its “dark face” and is “wholly convinced” now that this “composite
face . . . was the face of his own personal past.”66

­Transcultural Interference: Difference and Diffraction

I have argued that Saadawi’s zombie is an act of repossession, a cultural

reclamation of a figure that has been used in popular culture to demonize and
oppress Haitian/African and Arab “others.” This repossession is not achieved
through synthesis but through provocation, pushing the zombie figure beyond
accepted or existing positions, allowing for the rewriting of a myth. These
provocations are diffractive encounters in which Afro-Haitian and Iraqi identities
and experiences interfere and overlap with one another, while differences
between the cultures are maintained. The idea of diffraction comes initially
from the field of physics to describe how phenomena are produced when waves
encounter obstacles on their path. Put simply, waves curve and bend around
obstacles, and overlap with other waves. New Materialist thinkers such as Donna
Haraway (1992) and Karan Barad (2007) have adopted this idea to explore how
entrenched dualisms inherited from the Enlightenment might be overcome. In
the Western philosophical tradition, differences are defined and contained, in
order to be assimilated and erased. Reading diffractively allows us to go beyond
binary understandings of sameness and difference, to see how transcultural
expressions interfere with one another, and co-establish each other’s identities,
while allowing for and encouraging the expression of cultural differences.
This idea of diffractive interference is clear when we consider how the
title of the novel forces readers to pay attention to difference and offers the
impulse to assimilate difference. From the beginning, readers are led to expect
connections to Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel. However, as critics have pointed
out, the Whatsitsname bears little resemblance to the monster in Frankenstein.67
The gothic predecessor, assembled from dead cadavers and brought to life by
the scientist, is an abject figure that transgresses the boundaries between life and
death, highlighting nineteenth-century anxieties about man’s mastery of nature.
Unlike Shelley’s monster, however, the Whatsitsname comes into the world with
language and purpose, and is never in awe of its creator. Importantly, it does not
have a soul in the humanist sense, although it acknowledges that souls inhabit it
and speak to it, without possessing it.68 In fact, Saadawi’s monster is never referred
to as “Frankenstein’s monster” and is instead given a number of other names: the
170 Decolonizing the Undead

Criminal, Criminal X, the One Who Has No Name, the Savior, among others.
The only time “Frankenstein” is mentioned in the text is in reference to how a
magazine article about the Whatsitsname is retitled “Frankenstein in Baghdad,”
complete with a photo of Robert De Niro as the monster from the film Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein.69 This act of assimilation represents the appropriation of
local mythologies by the global media; it disappoints the author of the article and
Saadawi does not endorse this view in the rest of the novel. The title therefore
raises expectations that are thwarted. We are instead given a monster that speaks
to lost souls, and that consults with magicians who speak to the jinns, spirits that
exist in Arab culture and Islamic belief. These elements suggest that the sources
the Whatsitsname is based on are of non-European heritage and that the world it
exists in is not the rational, enlightened world of Frankenstein’s monster, which
constitutes a shift in ideological valences.
In referencing Frankenstein, Saadawi forces us to see how our understanding
of the Whatsitsname depends on its difference from Shelley’s monster. We are
confronted with the insufficiency of Shelley’s monster as a symbol of otherness.
Frankenstein’s monster and the Whatsitsname are brought together in uneasy
tension, and we are left with an ideological clash that is not the undoing of either
monster, but rather a refusal to submit to a one-dimensional understanding of
otherness, and a resistance to homogenizing forces of globalization. In relation
to the Haitian zombie, however, as I have suggested, we become aware of how
the interaction of differences can sometimes lead to spaces of entanglement
where localized experiences overlap. The result of this entanglement, however,
is a not a hybrid identity but rather an uncanny unfamiliarity that hinges on
the fact that the zombie figure has been unsettled. Saadawi’s zombie, in its
placelessness, its lack of subjectivity, and its undead status, is recognizable.
And yet the Whatsitsname is a strange kind of zombie at the same time. It is
inhabited by different spirits without identifying with or being controlled
by any of them. It has no soul and yet it is not mindless, nor without agency,
suggesting a radically unfamiliar subjective state. It wanders the lands it is
excluded from but its wandering is purposeful. We understand that Saadawi
borrows the trope of another oppressed culture in order to express solidarity
with it, but the estrangement of the figure emphasizes that there is diversity
and difference within the experience of colonialism. Being attentive to such
entanglements allows us to see how transcultural interference works at the edges
of cultural boundaries, invalidating unitary understandings of culture. The new
meanings that emerge from diffractive interactions emphasize the fundamental
incompleteness of any one culture, and the need therefore for openness and
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 171

exchange between cultures. Seeing cultures in this way offers possibilities for
finding alternative spaces of meaning that dismantle Western colonial structures
of antagonism and exclusion.

Notes

1 Kee, Not Your Average Zombie, 7–8, 13.

2 Yi-Fu, Space and Place, 6. Following Yi-Fu, “place” here refers to more than simply
a location but rather one imbued with the meaning that people give to it. Place
indicates security. This is different from “space,” which is an abstract concept that
indicates freedom.
3 Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 12.
4 Ackermann and Gauthier, “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” 473. According
to Ackermann and Gauthier, there can be zombies of the body and zombies of the
soul in vodou belief. Within this distinction, there are “many sub-types classified
either according to their origin or to the mode of zombification.”
5 McAlister, Rara!, 105. In Haitian accounts, it is not clear whether zombies are
inherently malevolent.
6 Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 87.
7 Seabrook, The Magic Island, 93.
8 Seabrook, Voodoo Island, 100–1.
9 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 8, 16.
10 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37. Dayan connects the zombie to Haitian
revolutionary Jean Zombi, commenting that this gives those formerly enslaved
power over the oppressors. This imbues the zombie figure with a revolutionary
energy.
11 Dendle, The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, 3.
12 Kee, Not Your Average Zombie, 8.
13 Dendle, “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” 46.
14 Bellegarde-Smith et al., “Haiti and Its Occupation by the United States in 1915,” 15.
15 Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 35–6.
16 Laguerre, The Military and Society in Haiti, 65–6.
17 Fay, “Dead Subjectivity,” 89, 93.
18 See Klare, “The New Geopolitics”; Chomsky, “It’s Imperialism, Stupid,” for
example.
19 Brown and Burrel, “Iraqi ‘zombie gas’ Arsenal Revealed.”
20 Craige, Black Bagdad, 1–2.
21 Berry and Epstein, Transcultural Experiments, 11.
22 Epstein, “Transculture,” 333.
172 Decolonizing the Undead

23 Berry and Epstein, Transcultural Experiments, 160–1.

24 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 51.
25 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 143.
26 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 136.
27 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 143–4.
28 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 1–2.
29 Simon and Tejirian, “Introduction: The Creation of Iraq.”
30 Fletcher, “Running the Corridor,” 187–8.
31 Simon and Tejirian, “Introduction: The Creation of Iraq.”
32 Damaluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq,” xx.
33 Rubaii, “Tripartheid,” 126.
34 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 118.
35 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 156.
36 Graham, “Cities as Strategic Sites,” 32.
37 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 6–8.
38 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 19.
39 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 23.
40 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 25.
41 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 178.
42 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 6.
43 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 16.
44 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 259.
45 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 66, 68.
46 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 259.
47 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 5.
48 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 51.
49 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 62.
50 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 53.
51 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 24, 142.
52 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
53 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10.
54 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24.
55 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 136–7.
56 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 146.
57 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 259.
58 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 140–1.
59 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 193.
60 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 193.
61 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 207.
62 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 194.
 Zombies, Placelessness, and Transcultural Entanglement 173

63 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243–4.

64 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 224.
65 Singh, Unthinking Mastery, Chap. 1.
66 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 250.
67 See Campbell, “Double Estrangement and Developments in Arabic Science
Fiction,” for example.
68 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 124.
69 Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad, 133.

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28 Weeks Later [Film] Dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, USA: 20th Century Fox, 2007.
Ackermann, Hans-W. and Jeanine Gauthier. “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi.”
Journal of American Folklore 104, no. 414 (1991): 466–94.
Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, Alex Dupuy, Robert Fatton Jr., Mary Renda, Ermitte St.
Jacques and Jeffrey Sommers. “Haiti and Its Occupation by the United States in
1915: Antecedents and Outcomes.” Journal of Haitian Studies 21, no. 2 (2015): 10–43.
Bishop, Kyle. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead
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 ­1 1

“First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie”:

Portrayal of the West in Contemporary Indian
Zombie Literature and Cinema
Abhirup Mascharak

Nearly thirty minutes into Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D. K.’s Go Goa Gone (2013),
billed as India’s first zombie comedy, we see the protagonists—a trio of young
men called Bunny, Hardik, and Luv—having a conversation. They had come the
previous night to an island near the Indian state of Goa to attend a rave. The
next day, they find that most of the other attendees have turned into lumbering,
cannibalistic beings. Having run into the wilds to escape these creatures, the trio
pause to catch their breaths and try to determine what, exactly, the attendees
have morphed into. Hardik is the one who finally gets it: “They are zombies,” he
exclaims. “We have heard of ghosts in India,” remark his friends, “but where did
these zombies come from?” “Globalization,” Hardik says. “These firangis [white
foreigners] are a nuisance. First they brought the HIV, now the zombie.”
It is easy to treat this remark as just a joke; the film is, after all, a zombie
comedy. But this is not the only instance in Go Goa Gone where acrimonious
thoughts on Westerners find expression, and given how the film, as a whole,
portrays the West and Westernized Indians, it would be fair to say that there is
more to this line than mere flippancy. But before we undertake an analysis of
the film’s stance on Westernization, it is essential to look at the earlier Indian
narratives featuring zombies, since a contrast with those older tales alone can let
us understand how Go Goa Gone marks a new phase in the portrayal of zombies
in Indian popular culture, and study the factors which ushered in this phase.
Zombie films as we know them did not exist in Indian cinema before 2013,
when, alongside Go Goa Gone, Luke Kenny and Devaki Singh’s Rise of the
Zombie had also released. The closest thing to a zombie film that Indian cinema
had before 2013 is Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay’s Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (Two
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 177

Yards Below the Ground, 1972), which tells the story of Rajvansh, an aristocrat,
who is seemingly murdered by his adulterous wife and her associates. Not
long afterward, the killers find themselves pursued by what seems to be the
reanimated corpse of Rajvansh. In the end, though, we learn that it was all an
elaborate charade: Rajvansh is alive, and has been tormenting his enemies by
masquerading as a zombie with the aid of his loyal servants. As per Kevin Boon’s
taxonomy of zombies, Rajvansh is a “zombie ruse,”1 a phrase used to describe
tales which seem to be about zombies but actually have little to do with them.
Indian literature, on the other hand, does have texts where actual zombies
appear, such as the works of Hemendra Kumar Roy,2 a pioneering figure in
Bengali popular fiction. In Manush-Pisach (The Human Demon), for instance,
Roy’s detective heroes, Jayanta and Manik, battle a sorcerer who can infuse life
into corpses, which are then sent to do his bidding. The murderer in Maran
Khelar Khelowar (The Game of Death) likewise uses his sorcerous powers to
revive corpses and sends them to murder his enemies. A zombie also appears
in Oloukik (Paranormal), a short play by Roy, though it has no major role in the
story. The antagonists in each of these stories—the Muslim cleric in Manush-
Pisach, and the Hindu tantriks (the members of certain sects within Hinduism
who, according to the lore that has developed around them, have mastered black
magic) in Manush-Pisach and Oloukik—bring corpses to life by performing
certain rituals and uttering incantations. Their zombies are what one may call
the “zombie drone,” which William Seabrook defines as a “soulless human
corpse” that has been exhumed from the grave and “endowed by sorcery with
a mechanical semblance of life”; this is done “occasionally for the commission
of some crime, more often simply as the drudge around the habitation.”3 Roy
writes exclusively of zombies belonging to this category, never envisioning any
nonmagical means for creating zombies.
He also situates his zombies in a discernibly Indian milieu which betrays no
influence of the Western books and films on zombies which were published or
released during his lifetime. Shankar, the villain in Oloukik, worships a deity
of the Santhals, a tribe that lives in eastern India. Shashanka, the villain in
Maran Khelar Khelowar, creates his zombie killers by subjecting the corpses to
rituals that involve worshipping them with flowers and sandalwood paste at the
shamshan (Hindu cremation ground) on new moon nights—a process that is
strikingly similar to shava sadhana, the tantrik ceremony which is believed to
bring unspoiled corpses back to life. These details show that Roy, even within
the handful of works of his that deal with zombies, was trying to create a zombie
lore that is decidedly Indian and does not mimic the Western zombie stories.
178 Decolonizing the Undead

One assumes this was part of Roy’s agenda, expressed in the foreword of his
novel Abar Jaker Dhan (Again a Treasure of the Yaksha), of leaving behind a
literary oeuvre which will teach his young, Bengali readers to be themselves
instead of succumbing to the myth of the superiority of the West. Till the onset
of the new millennium, the zombie stories in Bengali popular literature, such as
Manabendra Pal’s Oloukik Jallad (The Paranormal Executioner, 1990), stuck to
the traditions established by Roy: they feature the zombies of “zombie drone”
variety (which have been created through sorcery) and employ an ethos that is
dominantly Indian.
In contrast, contemporary Indian zombie novels, pertinent examples of which
are Mainak Dhar’s Zombiestan (2012) and Chronicler of the Undead (2015), are
markedly influenced by Hollywood. They portray worlds beset with a zombie
apocalypse, and the central characters are a ragtag group who must devise a way
to end the apocalypse or rebuild their lives in a world that has changed beyond
recognition. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which has spawned
many sequels, remakes, and imitations, and more recently Paul Anderson’s
Resident Evil (2001), which has also had multiple sequels, have popularized
this particular zombie-story template, and Dhar’s novels are evidence of that
popularity. While the plots in these novels are not exact replicas of the storylines
in the said films, reading them alongside Roy’s zombie tales makes clear the
comparatively Westernized nature of Dhar’s works. Indian films have likewise
chosen Hollywood as the model when it comes to producing zombie yarns. Go
Goa Gone is evidently inspired by zombie comedies like Edgar Wright’s Shaun of
the Dead (2004) and Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009), while the plot of Rise
of the Zombie, which chronicles a man’s gradual zombification, has similarities
with Andrew Parkinson’s I, Zombie (1998).
This emulation of Western zombie texts indicates that the target audience
for such films is the young, urban, educated segment of the Indian population,
who have seen the Hollywood films that Dhar’s novels and the 2013 Hindi
zombie films have emulated, and hence, are more likely to appreciate the tropes,
conventions, and tenor employed in these new age Indian zombie stories.
Liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 and the subsequent globalization
experienced by the country made it easier to access Hollywood cinema, whether
in the multiplexes that began to spring up in the cities or via the DVDs which
could be purchased or rented, or through the internet, from which films can be
downloaded. The recent Indian zombie texts cater mainly to this generation that
has grown up during the post-liberalization era, on a steady diet of Hollywood
cinema. This is evident, also, in their choice of language—Dhar writes in English
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 179

(unlike Roy, who wrote in Bengali), and the characters in Rise of the Zombie and
Go Goa Gone mix a good deal of English into their conversations, which imparts
to the films a “Western” veneer. Moreover, like the undead in most Hollywood
zombie films, the zombies in these recent Indian novels and films combine in
them the characteristics of the “bio zombie” (zombies which are created by
chemical or biological agents) and the “zombie ghoul” (which eats humans).
The emulation of Western zombie cinema in these works exists, however,
alongside a peculiar antipathy toward the West as a sociopolitical entity, a
consistent “Other”-ing of the Westerners and the Westernized Indians. Each of
them describes the zombie epidemic as having started in the West, and then
engulfing the rest of the world. Zombiestan posits that a drone strike by the
Americans on a cache of weapons belonging to terrorists in Afghanistan causes
a chemical emission which converts the terrorists into zombies, who then bite
others and turn them into the undead. The epidemic rapidly makes its way
into India, and the novel shows the Indian characters not only battling zombies
but also possessing the cure to the malaise. Chronicler of the Undead similarly
mentions that the zombie epidemic which has ended the human civilization,
as we know it, originated in the United States and shows Indians as heroically
striving to sustain themselves amid the apocalypse. The impression conveyed in
these novels, however subtly, is that the West creates troubles and leaves the rest
of the world to clean up after it.
This idea is expressed more unambiguously, and with a more pronouncedly
conservative bent, in the Hindi zombie films. The opening sequence of Go Goa
Gone shows its main characters living a life which many Indians would deem
antithetical to Indian values. They do not live, unlike “good” Indians, with their
families, but by themselves in a rented apartment. With no adults supervising
them, it is implied, their lives have degenerated into wanton excesses. Hardik
and Luv’s introductory scene shows them as so intoxicated with the marijuana
that they have smoked that they cannot even pick up a remote and change
the channel on the television. The developments in this scene, such as Hardik
stating that the liquor and the pizza he has purchased were bought with the
money he was supposed to have paid that month’s electricity bills with, are
obviously humorous, but the spectators are meant to laugh at the characters,
not with them. They are portrayed as pathetic and ridiculous in their hedonistic
way of life. What is more, the pot-induced glazed look in their eyes, their halting
speech, and their inability to move their limbs indicate that the decadent life
they lead has already zombified them metaphorically; what happens later, with
actual zombies threatening to turn them into the undead, is but the outcome
180 Decolonizing the Undead

of the lifestyle they have chosen. This lifestyle is a decidedly Western one, its
foreignness manifested not just in the characters’ consumption of Western food
items like pizza or their doping and drinking (which, in the popular Indian
consciousness, are vices learned from the West) but also in their speech (which
is replete with expressions like “STFU” and “WTF”), their clothes (which consist
of shirts, trousers, and T-shirts), and their candid discussions on sex (which,
as per the brand of conservatism endorsed by Go Goa Gone, is the worst of the
vices Indians have imbibed from the West).
Indeed, it is with regard to sex that Go Goa Gone’s repudiation of the West
is most visibly manifested. In this, it harks back to the slasher films of yore,
like Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) and John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978), where having sex meant death. Since Go Goa Gone is a more light-
hearted work, it avoids the ultra-violent death scenes which characterizes those
films, but retains the sexphobia inherent in them, because this particular aspect
of yesteryear slasher cinema is in tune with the unease over sex that is typical of
the Indian mind-set. It is not an accident that Goa serves as the backdrop of the
better part of the film. This Indian state’s long stay under Portuguese colonial
rule—while the rest of India was liberated from the British in 1947, Goa
remained under Portugal’s control till 1961—its large Christian population, the
development of hippie settlements there during the 1960s, and its popularity as
a tourist destination for Westerners have led the rest of the country to perceive
it as a place more Western than Indian, a place where one can drink, dope, and
have sex with a wantonness that the rest of India would not permit. That is the
reason Hardik and Luv decide to go on a trip to Goa. Hardik’s tryst with a female
colleague has ended disastrously, while Luv discovers that his girlfriend has been
cheating on him. Dejected, they decide that they need a headlong plunge into
hedonism to recuperate, and the best place to indulge in such hedonism in India
is, of course, Goa. The more straitlaced Bunny, who is set to attend a conference
in Goa, does not want Hardik and Luv to accompany him. However, they insist
on traveling with Bunny, and, upon reaching Goa, they even persuade him to
come to the aforementioned rave, which is organized by the Russian mafia that,
according to news reports in India, run a thriving drug business in Goa. It is
during this rave that a new drug is served to the attendees, the consumption
of which turns them into zombies. Bunny, Hardik, and Luv escape this
zombification because they do not have the money to purchase drugs. However,
they are still in mortal peril, because whomever these zombies bite also turn into
zombies. Like Dhar’s novels, then, Go Goa Gone portrays the zombie epidemic
as having been started by Western/Westernized entities: the Russian mob, and
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 181

their Indian agents. Consequently, every Westerner who had organized and
attended this party is penalized with zombification, either through the drug or
by the bites of those zombified by the drug. Not a single Westerner is allowed to
escape the island.
Being Indian is not, however, a safeguard against zombification either; one
must be the right sort of Indian. This is where the film’s sexphobia comes in. The
main characters—Bunny, Hardik, Luv, a drug-mafia leader who calls himself
Boris, and a young woman, Luna, who had come to the party—manage to make
it out of the island mainly because of their essential “goodness,” the yardstick
to measure which in Go Goa Gone is abstinence (whether voluntary or not)
from sex. This subtext of sexphobia in the film, though well-concealed under
a chic surface which references Hollywood zombie films and portrays sybaritic
pleasures openly, does become evident once we look closely enough. Bunny, who
is not uninterested in sex, yet lacks the confidence to approach women, is spared
the zombification, despite some close shaves. Luv, who swears in an early scene to
opt out of the hedonist life he has been living, is sucked back into it only because
of his girlfriend’s infidelity, and even then, he does not actually get to have sex,
because Luna, who he pursues, turns him down. He had never slept with his
girlfriend either, since he believed in “doing it” only after marriage. Hence, he
escapes zombification, while his adulterous girlfriend, who, coincidentally, had
also come to the rave, does not, and nor does her lover. Her consistent spurning
of Hardik and Luv puts Luna in the “good” Indian category. Hardik constantly
touts his “success” with the opposite sex, but since most women whom we see
him flirt with ultimately spurn him, his claims of sleeping with a plethora of
women are likely just tall tales. Indeed, he more or less acknowledges as much in
the scene where he tearfully says that a woman he loved had jilted him, and that
the louche persona he has subsequently adopted is just a shield for his broken
heart. This means that Hardik, like his friends, is also, ultimately, a “good boy,”
and this is what spares him the zombification, despite his tryst with Ariana, a
Russian woman he meets at the party.
As per the sexphobic paradigm of the film, this should have condemned him
to zombiehood. Yet, since his rakishness is not innate, since he is not really a
Casanova, he is spared that fate. Which is not to say that his liaison with Ariana
goes completely unpunished: Boris, upon learning that Ariana had consumed
the zombifying drug before sleeping with Hardik, almost kills the latter, since he
thinks having sex with her will turn Hardik into a zombie. Hardik experiences
that panic as well, even checking his genitals to see if they have been infected by
the intercourse he had with Ariana. An earlier scene had informed the viewers
182 Decolonizing the Undead

that once zombified, a person loses all desires which sentient beings have, except
that of hunger. In other words, Go Goa Gone, despite its comparative generosity
toward Hardik, nonetheless threatens him, over his tryst with Ariana, with the
loss of his capacity to have sex, not to mention the threat of losing his life to
Boris and his aide, Nikolai. He is spared only because his Westernized exterior
hides an inner “Indianness.”
Such is also the case with Boris, an Indian masquerading as a Russian; the
crisis of the zombie epidemic serves to bring out the Indian within him, which he
has been trying, unsuccessfully, to conceal under his dyed hair and his ability to
speak Russian fluently. This is symbolically portrayed in the scene where Bunny
sees through Boris’ “Russianness,” and says that the latter looks “desi.” With his
masquerade thus punctured, Boris ceases to speak in Russian and the heavily
accented English which he was conversing in till this point, and starts talking in
Hindi, which marks the beginning of the recovery of his Indianhood. Though
he is part of the mafia that had manufactured and sold the zombifying drug, his
shepherding of Bunny, Hardik, Luv, and Luna to safety means that he has done
his duty toward fellow Indians; his giving up of the large stash of cocaine in his
possession to stop the zombies (who are stupefied when cocaine is sprinkled on
them) signifies the severing of his ties with the drug trade run by Westerners;
and he shows little interest in sex, which means his association with the Russians
has not erased his Indian sense of “decency.” That is why he can board the boat
which takes the others out of the island, while Nikolai, who is truly Russian,
cannot; like every other Westerner in the film, he turns into a zombie.
To sum up, living to tell the tale in Go Goa Gone is conditional on being
ethnically Indian and repudiating Westernization, especially through the
adoption of a puritanical view of sex. This puritanism, unsurprisingly, covers
homosexuality, which is treated as a joke and associated with degeneration.
Bunny, when he sees Hardik and Luv hugging, quips that he knew all along
that they are gay, to which Hardik responds with an indignant “Fuck you”—a
classic instance of gay panic “humor.” Later, during the rave that leads to the
zombie epidemic, two women are seen kissing. Placing a moment of lesbianism
against a scenario of drug-induced revelry which culminates in something
dreadful connects homosexuality to the Western decadence which the film
deplores, and sex, of any and every sort (except maybe that which takes place
within a monogamous heterosexual marriage), is, according to Go Goa Gone,
the main characteristic of that decadence. The association it had drawn between
zombiehood and HIV is thus part of this worldview. HIV is transmitted through
sex, and in the diegetic universe of Go Goa Gone, the nontraditional, Westernized
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 183

lifestyle where one can indulge in sex at will (as Luv’s girlfriend and her lover
did, and as, one can assume, the Westerners like Ariana, who have come to the
rave, do) makes one a zombie.
Rise of the Zombie enunciates its stance against Westernization mainly through
its casting. The central character, Neil Parker, is played by Luke Kenny, an actor
of British and Italian descent. The part he plays—that of a man whom an insect
bite turns into a zombie—does not require an actor of Kenny’s ethnicity. Yet,
not only does a white actor play Neil but his whiteness is underscored. As Neil
slowly becomes a zombie, he ceases to maintain contact with humans, staying in
the jungle where he had been camping. Vini, Neil’s girlfriend, grows tense over
his disappearance, and puts up missing persons’ posters, where Neil is described
as having “fair” skin, “hazel” eyes, and “light brown hair.” Thus, despite having
an Indian father (Neil’s whiteness, one assumes, is something he has inherited
from his deceased mother, though the film does not clarify this), an Indian best
friend (called Aneesh), and an Indian girlfriend, not to mention a fluency in
Hindi, Neil’s white, Western identity is never in doubt, courtesy the casting
of Kenny and the lifestyle Neil leads in the film. He attends bachelor parties,
and travels with backpacks and his camera, his get-up resembling that of white
tourists in India. As a wildlife photographer, he leads a bohemian life, spending
months in the wilderness. Like the young men in Go Goa Gone, Neil does not
have familial ties. He is estranged from his father, whose lament that he should
have cared more for Neil after the death of the latter’s mother indicates the film’s
ideological stance on what constitutes the “right” way of living: a single-parent
household, it implies, is a deficient household, which can never teach a child to
value relationships, and instead pushes him into a rudderless, wandering way
of life. Neil does not spend much time with Vini either, which means that the
possibility of him ever marrying and having children is slim. This shunning of
a “normal” life to instead live an adventurous traveler’s life which is glorified in
Western literature and culture is what, the film suggests, imperils Neil, making
him venture recklessly into jungles with deadly creatures, like the insect which
bites him.
The sexphobia of Go Goa Gone is repeated here, in the scene where Neil,
shortly after being bitten, meets a local girl and takes her to his tent. When he
wakes up the next morning, she is nowhere to be seen, until Neil lifts his rug and
discovers a severed human hand; his zombie tendencies have already started
showing, causing Neil to devour the woman. The sort of no-strings-attached
sex which Indians associate with Western lifestyles is shown here as something
that is outright monstrous. The desire to not only link but underscore this
184 Decolonizing the Undead

monstrousness with the West is the reason, it can be plausibly assumed, that
a white man like Kenny has been cast as Neil. That monstrousness leads to an
epidemic when Neil starts biting the Indians living in the region, turning them
into zombies. Much as the Russians start the zombie epidemic in Go Goa Gone,
the white, Westernized Neil starts it in Rise of the Zombie, and as much as the
Indian characters in Dhar’s novels and Go Goa Gone must, to save their country,
deal with the scourge unleashed by the West, so must Aneesh and Neil’s father
take up the task of killing the zombies Neil has created. The sudden, ambiguous
ending of the film leaves it unclear whether they find Neil or what they will do
if they locate him. What is clear, though, is the conservative repudiation of the
West and all things Westernized as unhealthy and monstrous.
The roots of this mind-set which regards Indianness as incompatible with
anything Western can be traced back to the days of British rule in India. The
colonial enterprise of “civilizing” the denizens of the conquered lands involved
not only indoctrinating them in the superiority of the West but also deploring
indigenous cultures as outdated, superstitious, and lacking in philosophical,
moral, and aesthetic value. Before long, Indians began retaliating against this
blanket condemnation of their culture. An example of this can be seen in
Bhubanchandra Mukhopadhyay’s translation of G. W. M. Reynolds’ Joseph
Wilmot (1854), published under the title Bilater Guptokotha (The Secrets of
England, 1889). Mukhopadhyay states that his purpose behind this translation
is to undertake a comparative study of “civilization as it is manifested in the east
and the west,”4 and goes on to opine:

Seeing that the English take a lot of interest in civilizing us and say that our
culture must be cleansed with the touch of civilization as they define it, surely it
is not wrong to inspect them in return and undertake an impartial observation
of the decadence which characterizes the lives of the high and the mighty
individuals among them . . . Those Indians that consider the Englishmen to be
gods would certainly find in this story some English characters noble enough to
merit the descriptor “godlike.” However, they would see many others who are
more akin to the devil.5

This is essentially Mukhopadhyay using the British’s own work against them,
using Reynolds’ portrayal of the seamy underbelly of England’s society and
the debauchery of its aristocrats to demonstrate that the colonial rhetoric of a
civilized West and a savage East is an untruthful one. The tendency among certain
Indians, especially the upper classes, to ape British customs had also attracted the
satirical opprobrium of Indian artists, as can be seen in Rabindranath Tagore’s
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 185

short story “Rajtika” (The Mark of a King, 1898) and the Bengali film Bilat
Pherot (England-returned, 1921), directed by Dhiren Ganguly and N. C. Lahiri.
But while the crimes of the British in India were many, and the need to
oppose their indoctrination program was genuine, it has had the unfortunate
outcome of inculcating among a large segment of Indians a misguided belief that
a truly Indian identity can only be forged through a complete repudiation of the
West—especially its greater tolerance in the matters of love and marriage, and
its general endorsement of individualism—and embracing, unquestioningly,
traditional Indian values. Tagore’s novel Ghare-Baire (The Home and the
World, 1916), which unfolds against the anti-colonial Swadeshi movement in
Bengal, portrays, critically, how jingoism and sociocultural orthodoxy can be
legitimized under the guise of fighting colonialism. Postindependence Indian
society, however, has largely ignored Tagore’s warnings, instead valorizing
“virtues” like obeying elders, not indulging in romantic and sexual relationships
before marriage, marrying within one’s own community, observing the social
and religious customs of the milieu one is born into, living with and as per the
rules and needs of the family (rather than pursuing one’s own needs), and, most
importantly, never emulating the ways of the West even if one must reside there
to make a living (indeed, the concern over remaining true to one’s culture and
the worry that one’s children will become Westernized are strongest among
diasporic Indians).
This rigid definition of being a “true” Indian has sometimes been mocked
in Hindi popular cinema, as in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s comedies Golmaal
(Pandemonium, 1979) and Kissise Naa Kehna (Don’t Tell Anyone, 1983). More
often, though, this mind-set is uncritically celebrated. One egregious example
of such celebration is Manoj Kumar’s Purab aur Paschim (East and West, 1970),
where the patriotic hero travels to London and educates the Indians living there
(who have submerged themselves in the “decadence” of the West) on the glories
of the traditional Indian lifestyle. Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (Union, 1964) and Shakti
Samanta’s An Evening in Paris (1967) express similar ideas, portraying their
Indian characters as maintaining their chastity even in the midst of whites who
kiss each other openly. This strain of conservatism persisted in Indian cinema,
in varying degrees, right up to the 1990s, when it received immense boost with
releases like Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Bravehearts Will
Take Home the Brides, 1995) and Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something
Is Happening, 1998). In both, being well-versed in Indian socioreligious customs
is celebrated, while Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge makes a fetish of deferring to
parental approval when it comes to marriage.
186 Decolonizing the Undead

In many ways, the 1990s had the ideal zeitgeist for making such films, whose
definition of what constitutes Indianness is obdurate and inflexible. This was
the era which saw the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose right-wing,
quasi-theocratic principles entail conserving Indian culture (which, to them,
is synonymous with Hindu culture) against Muslims (whom the BJP considers
“outsiders” and “invaders” who pose a threat to Hinduism) and the Western
civilization. Art, especially popular cinema, tends to reflect social, cultural, and
political trends of the period it was made in, and films like Kuch Kuch Hota
Hai and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge served to assure the spectators of the
1990s, among whom the BJP’s ideals were becoming increasingly popular, that
the globalization which India was experiencing at the time need not lead to the
erosion of “Indian culture” as defined by the BJP, that even if one grew up in the
West, they could still be upholders of traditional values. The success of these
films was evidence of the chord they had struck with the Indian audiences of
the 1990s, and the conservative definition of Indianness contained in them has
been repeated in many subsequent releases, such as Nikhil Advani’s Kal Ho Naa
Ho (Tomorrow May Not Come, 2003), Vipul Shah’s Namaste London (Greetings,
London, 2007), Shashank Khaitan’s Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya (Humpty
Sharma’s Bride, 2014), Chopra’s Befikre (Wild, 2015), and Nitin Kakkar’s Jawani
Janeman (My Darling Youth, 2020). The messages in these films—that cohabiting
relationships are no substitutes for marriage, that refusing to settle down and
start a family is the sign of moral deficiency, that homosexuality does not exist
among Indians, that permission from the parents is a must in marriage—reek of
the conservatism espoused by the BJP, their voters, and the 1990s hits which had
vigorously popularized such ideas on the celluloid.
The films mentioned above are romantic melodramas, a genre that, at first
glance, has nothing in common with the zombie films discussed in this chapter.
Ideologically, however, Rise of the Zombie and Go Goa Gone traverse the same
route as these romances in terms of their stance on the “evils” of Westernization.
This is not surprising. With the right-wing on the rise in Indian politics, and their
way of thinking gaining increasing traction in a society that was never liberal
to begin with (as the hostile responses to the educational and social reforms
of Henry Derozio, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, and Rammohun Roy in the
nineteenth century demonstrate), popular cinema would cater to the zeitgeist in
order to ensure commercial success. Though neither of the Hindi zombie films
analyzed here were hits, and the sequels they were supposed to spawn never
materialized, this was possibly owing to the dearth of zombie literature and
cinema in India (unlike the West, where they have been a steady part of popular
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 187

culture at least since Romero’s films released), which meant that Indian viewers
likely did not quite know what to make of them. The lack of stars (even Saif Ali
Khan, who portrays Boris in Go Goa Gone, was no longer a top star in 2013)
and, in the case of Rise of the Zombie, a lackluster, monotonously paced storyline
had also contributed to their poor collections. It is hard to imagine that the
conservative worldview in these films had, in any way, kept people away, given
that other Hindi films with similarly orthodox worldviews have succeeded, and
continue to succeed, commercially in India.
Nevertheless, some recent forays into zombie stories in Hindi cinema have
moved beyond the India-versus-West binary that characterizes Rise of the
Zombie and Go Goa Gone, or even, if only to a lesser extent, the novels of Dhar.
In Betaal (2020), a web series helmed by Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan,
the zombies come in the shape of the reanimated corpses of the British soldiers
of the East India Company. When these soldiers were trapped inside a tunnel by
Indian rebels during the 1857 mutiny, their sorcery-practicing leader, Colonel
Lynedoch, performed a ritual involving human sacrifice to immortalize himself
as the living dead by worshipping Betaal, a lapsed god turned evil angel. He
then bit and turned the others in his regiment into zombies as well. Upon their
liberation 160 years later, they wreak havoc. This series could easily have become
another story of Indian heroes battling a horde of Western zombies. Instead,
Graham and Mahajan draw parallels between colonial savageries of Englishmen
like Lynedoch and the atrocities committed by the Indians who rule the country
now. The British zombies manage to escape from the tunnel only because an
Indian military unit, operating under the orders of a greedy businessman called
Mudhalvan (who has the backing of the ruling party), blasts open the tunnel to
build a road, which requires the displacement of the tribals living nearby. The
tribals, who know of the zombies living inside the tunnel, oppose Mudhalvan’s
venture. However, Mudhalvan and the commandos violently remove them,
shooting some of the tribals dead.
Such violence is justified under the claim that the villagers are “Naxals.”
The term refers to an extremist leftist group that is active in parts of India, and
claims to champion the country’s impoverished tribal populations. The Naxals’
aim of overthrowing parliamentary democracy through armed uprising and
assassinations, the coercive methods they use to recruit new members, and
their indulgence in drug trade and extortion to finance their activities deserve
unsparing condemnation. However, the scenario in Betaal, where tribals with
legitimate grievances are denounced as Naxals and get killed or imprisoned when
they seek justice, is based on actual events as well. The displacing of tribals from
188 Decolonizing the Undead

the lands they have lived on for generations and giving those lands, which are rich
in mineral resources, to large businesses that engage in rampant deforestation
to mine those resources have also happened, with increasing frequency, under
the BJP’s rule. All of it is done under the guise of “development,” of giving the
tribals a more “civilized” life, just as the colonizers had justified their ventures
through the reasoning that they wish to bring civilization to the unenlightened
corners of the world. And much as the colonizers tolerated no dissent, anyone
questioning or criticizing ventures like Mudhalvan’s that have the backing of
the ruling party are called traitors in today’s India. If the colonizers needed
regiments like Lynedoch’s to consolidate their control over countries they
conquered, the rulers in independent India likewise rely on military units of
their own, like the one seen in Betaal, to ensure what they want is done. Hence,
as the more sympathetic Indian characters fight the English zombies, they must,
simultaneously, battle the indigenous oppressors who have replaced the British
in independent India. The willingness on the part of Betaal’s makers to portray
this continuum of oppression on Indian soil, from the days of the British to the
twenty-first century, lends it more nuance and thematic richness than can be
found in the earlier Hindi zombie films.
Even more daring is Dibakar Banerjee’s short film Monster, which is a part
of the anthology film Ghost Stories (2020), and which jettisons concerns over
Western presence/influence in/on India altogether to focus, instead, on the ills
plaguing the country from within. The protagonist of Monster, identified only
as “Visitor” in the credits, is a government employee sent to a village, Beesgarah
(or Smalltown), to assess the underperformance of its children in school. Upon
reaching his destination, he discovers a village devoid of any denizens except
two children, who inform him that the dwellers of Saugarah (Largetown) have
eaten all those who lived in Beesgarah, and that the only way to remain alive is
to either stay completely silent and out of the view of the Saugarah people or
to become cannibalistic zombies like the latter, since they do not harm those
who emulate them. The political subtext here is as obvious as it is resonant: the
scenario where those belonging to the smaller community (Beesgarah) must
either be “devoured” by the majority (Saugarah) or become invisible and silent,
or mold themselves into replicas of that majority, has clear parallels with what
non-Hindu communities, especially the Muslims, are told how they must live
in BJP-ruled India. Three moments in Monster make the parallels with the
situation in today’s India disquietingly clear. When the boy with whom Visitor
tries to escape Beesgarah is stopped by Saugarah’s zombie leader, the child must
eat the severed hand of the girl who lived with him to prove that he is like the
 “First They Bring the HIV, then the Zombie” 189

zombies. The scene invokes such incidents as the beating of a Muslim man
in Assam because he was selling beef; since cows are worshipped by Hindus,
this was deemed a crime by the Hindu hardliners. Much as the boy has to eat
human flesh to get past the zombies, this Muslim man had to eat pork, which
is considered unholy among Muslims, in order to pacify the crowd that had
gathered to “penalize” him. Then comes the scene where Visitor, chased by the
Saugarah zombies, tries to run away, only to trip and fall into a ditch. As the head
zombie hovers over him, Visitor silently folds his palms to beg mercy, asking the
monsters not to kill him. The sight is eerily similar to the much-circulated photo
of Qutubuddin Ansari, who, during the 2002 genocide in Gujarat, had similarly
pleaded with Hindu extremists to spare his life.
In the end, Visitor wakes up in that ditch; it seems, initially, that all that he
(and the viewers) had seen thus far is a dream. He walks into Beesgarah and
finds that it is completely unpopulated and dilapidated. Just then, a car appears,
and from it emerge the individuals whom he had seen as zombies in his “dream.”
They take him into the car, with the assurance that he is safe with them. They
tell him not to think much of the children in Beesgarah, who, they state, are
“useless” anyway. When Visitor says that it seems somebody has burned down
Beesgarah, one of them replies, “If they upset others, of course they will burn,”
his words a direct echo of the statements which have been made in India in
recent times to justify majoritarian violence against Muslims. Their leader then
joins the conversation, telling Visitor that Saugarah was once a much renowned
place. With him and his minions in charge, he remarks, “Those glory days will
return.” This line is obviously inspired by the slogan “Achhe din aa gaye” (Good
days have come) that the BJP had adopted during the 2014 elections, which
had brought them to power. Employing the zombie as a potent symbol of the
discriminatory violence that the incumbent rulers in contemporary India has
demonstrated on many occasions, this short film has opened up new avenues to
explore in Indian zombie cinema, which, one hopes, would grow not just in size
but also in quality in the years to come.

Notes

1 Boon, “And the Dead Shall Rise,” 8.

2 The dates of publication of most of the works of Hemendra Kumar Roy have not
been documented, so they have not been mentioned here either.
3 Seabrook, The Magic Island, 93.
190 Decolonizing the Undead

4 Mukhopadhyay, Bilati Guptokotha, 5, translation mine.

5 Mukhopadhyay, Bilati Guptokotha, 5, translation mine.

Works Cited

Betaal. [Film] Dirs. Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan, 2020.

Boon, Kevin. “And the Dead Shall Rise.” In Better Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie
as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 5–8. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2011.
Dhar, Mainak. Chronicler of the Undead. Chennai: Westland Publications, 2015.
Dhar, Mainak. Zombiestan. Chennai: Duckbill Publishers, 2012.
Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche. [Film] Dirs. Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1972.
Go Goa Gone. [Film] Dirs. Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K., 2013.
Monster, in Ghost Stories. [Film] Dir. Dibakar Banerjee, 2020.
Mukhopadhyay, Bhubanchandra. Bilater Guptokotha. Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya
Mandir, Third Edition, N.D.
Rise of the Zombie. [Film] Dirs. Luke Kenny and Devaki Singh, 2013.
Roy, Hemendra Kumar. Kishor Bhoutik Samagra, Parts 1–3. Kolkata: Patra Bharati
Publishers, 2005–6.
Seabrook, William. The Magic Island. New York: Dover Publications, 2016.
 ­1 2

From the Mountain to the Shore: Migration,

Water Crisis, and Revolutionary Zombies from
Haiti to Peru
Giulia Champion

Introduction: The Zombie of the Capitalocene1

As we know it in popular culture, the zombie is a figure of the market and made
for the market. It is governed by the market, not only because of its relation to
fluctuating wealth and financial crises but also because it is effectively made,
unmade, and remade by the marketplace. As many chapters in this collection
discuss, while the zombie is primarily a filmic or literary trope, it is used for
a variety of purposes, including advertisement: in 2019 Mexico City found its
streets invaded by black and yellow posters, showing a yellow hand seemingly
emerging from a tomb and accompanied by a message exclaiming, “Lo zombies sí
existen” (Of course zombies exist), followed by a URL leading curious observers
to an online webpage advertising Flanax® Nocto, an anti-inflammatory drug for
the alleviation of light or moderate pains which might cause insomnia.2 On the
site, one can read about the supposed “Efecto zombie” (zombie effect), where
someone might be “un ZOMBIE DEL DOLOR” (a PAIN ZOMBIE) if they are
in too much pain to sleep. The zombie, driven by the market to sell anything
from medicines to films, is a uniquely adaptable figure: the zombie is relevant
when describing a drone-like lethargic state as well as a violent cataclysmic
event—as embodied by the zombie apocalypse trope—and is even used to
spice up romantic comedies, such as Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) and
its subsequent 2013 film adaptation. As Kaiama L. Glover notes, “the zombie
embodies the fluidity of the boundaries between living and dead, material and
spiritual, natural and supernatural, etc.”3 The porous meaning of the zombie
192 Decolonizing the Undead

has only continued to grow, its role allocated to that which the market deems
returns to be the highest.
Furthermore, in a time of accelerated anthropogenic climate crisis, the shaping
and history of this figure of the marketplace are entangled with issues pertaining
to natural resource extraction and exploitation as well as uneven wealth (re-)
distribution, as is discussed in-depth by Kerstin Oloff in her groundbreaking
article “From Sugar to Oil: The Ecology of George A. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead” (2017):

This simultaneity and multiplicity of zombie figures arises from a world-system

that is profoundly uneven; one in which the spectacular benefits and liberties
made possible by oil and other energy sources are only unevenly accessible. As a
figure that has crossed from the world-systemic periphery to its new hegemonic
core, the zombie is one that—perhaps like no other—is inscribed with local and
global inequalities.4

Oloff ’s genealogical tree and nomenclature categorizing the “sugar-zombie”

alongside the “petro-zombie” illuminates their connection, bringing forth the
inextricable relation between plantation agriculture, enslaved labor, colonialism,
and our current economic system. The legacy of excessive monocrop agricultural
extractivism can be seen in current oil-extractive practices that abuse natural
resources to produce more fossil fuel at the smallest possible cost. Whether
these costs are economic, human, or environmental—all of which are deeply
entangled—the zombie offers a way of reading how economic systems relate to
the human and to the environment. Like petroleum, the zombie is fossilized,
necrotic matter deeply sedimented in our modern epistemologies,5 brought
back to life and refined for contemporary entertainment. It can thus become
an empty signifier made to represent and mean just what one wants it to; it sells
easily and well. However, to have a full picture of the zombie, it is necessary to
excavate and analyze the different uses and meanings of this figure. And such
an archaeology of the zombie requires that we consider its origin: that is, the
colonial and exploitative history that made the figure in the first place, and the
same system which allows for its continued and multifaceted use—and misuse—
as a trope and a character in popular culture.
This chapter aims to do this by analyzing the original zombie figure,
unearthed in Haiti, and tracing its emancipatory character through to another
revolutionary movement in Peru. Specifically, this chapter argues that the
zombie in the Haitian context is not just a figure representing slavery and
commodification—which, as noted above, is continued in some version of
 From the Mountain to the Shore 193

the contemporary popular culture zombie—but is also one deeply attached

to the Haitian Revolution and its emancipatory impetus. Hence, this chapter
aims to decolonize the zombie, first, by unearthing its emancipatory potential
in the context of its creation in Haitian history and culture and, second, by
comparatively considering how this potential can be identified in the Peruvian
novel Adiós, Ayacucho (1986) (Goodbye, Ayacucho) authored by Julio Ortega.
The history of Revolutions in Haiti and Peru shares similarities wherein undead
characters such as the zombie highlight emancipation. I will therefore briefly
focus on the Haitian context and how the zombie and vodou become core to
the liberation of the island during the Revolution. I will then consider how the
revolutionary potential of the zombie of the Haitian Revolution can be used to
read the undead character in Ortega’s novel by identifying similarities between
both countries’ revolutionary movements—the Túpac Amaru II Rebellion of
1780–2 and the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. Finally, I will discuss how, in
my view, both revolutionary movements are paid insufficient scholarly attention
regarding their role in both the advancement of human rights as well as their
connection to other uprisings.
In its entirety, the above analysis lends a memorializing aspect to the
project of decolonial zombie literature, as the epistemological and ontological
significance of the zombie is reclaimed, and its revolutionary potential
restored. The neglect and erasure of these features from academic discourse,
alongside the socio-ecological impact of (neo-)imperialist extractivism in
both countries, through plantation agriculture in Haiti and gold and silver
mining in Peru, provide points of comparison between two very different
nations. The undead character of Alfonso Cánepa in the novel is, for example,
an emancipatory zombie figure that raises important issues about the
Andean indigenous situation in a time of strife in Peru. Finally, my analysis
will conclude on how the civil turmoil lasting from the early 1980s to 2000
continues to impact the indigenous population, exacerbated by accelerated
climate change in a space where mining and export agriculture are further
worsening the water crisis.

Recognizing and Rehabilitating the Emancipatory Zombie

As Joan Dayan explains, “born out of the experience of slavery, the sea passage
from Africa to the New World, and revolution on the soil of Saint-Domingue,
the zombi tells the story of colonization.”6 She goes on to explain that the term
194 Decolonizing the Undead

“zombie” is a “Creole word that means spirit, revenant,” which became associated
with Jean Zombi, a formerly enslaved revolutionary, whereby it
thus became a terrible composite power: slave turned rebel ancestor turned
lwa, an incongruous, demonic spirit recognized through dreams, divination,
or possession. . . . “While the Haitian does not welcome any encounter with a
zombie, his real dread is that of being made into one himself.” This incarnation
of negation or vacancy is as much a part of history as the man Jean Zombi.7

Here Dayan notes the original dichotomy of the zombie, both a curse that brings
resting Haitians back to a never-ending life of forced labor and a mythologized
historical figure who played a crucial role in the Haitian Revolution. However,
the Revolution and its symbols, including vodou, its main actors, zombies, and
the island itself, were debased and degraded in Western rhetoric and politics as
Europe saw Haiti setting an undesirable example for their other colonies. From
then began an economic and trade embargo to which the island was subjected
for several decades. Haiti could only attempt to extirpate itself from this boycott
by paying an independence debt demanded by Charles X in 1825 to compensate
French planters for the loss of their lands and their enslaved people. The
extortionate amount demanded by France meant Haiti had to borrow money,
beginning a vicious cycle of indebtedness:
The denial of political existence was accompanied by other attacks on
sovereignty. In 1825 the Haitian government agreed to pay an indemnity to
France in return for diplomatic and economic relations. Exiled planters had
been clamoring for such a payment for years: it was meant to repay them
for what they had lost in Saint-Domingue, including the money invested in
their slaves, and amounted to a fine for revolution. Unable to pay, the Haitian
government took loans from French banks, entering a cycle of debt that would
last into the twentieth century.8

This cycle was accompanied by substantial negative propaganda about the

island. Consequently, the zombie figure became an exotic bogeyman along with
vodou, which was characterized as barbaric black magic. Renewed accusations of
savagery and cannibalism were made, part of a broader discourse of “otherness”
finding its roots in European history, as Kate Ramsey argues:
many of the historically most feared forms of supernatural aggression in
Haiti—including anthropophagy and the transformation of humans into
animals—strongly resemble the supernatural crimes attributed to “sorcerers” in
Europe in the late Middle Ages, and later to African and African-descended
ritual specialists in the context of the slave trade and colonization. . . . Haiti’s
 From the Mountain to the Shore 195

nineteenth-century European detractors seized upon such rumors as proof of

the regression of civilization in the “Black Republic.”9

Additionally, the rise of the United States as a superpower, since its independence
and its expansion to the south of its borders, led to the American occupation and
a second colonization of Haiti. With the excuse of “civilizing” their southern
neighbors, the United States occupied Cuba twice, for instance, where American
investment in sugar plantation had enormously increased.10 The occupation of
Haiti recalls colonization due to the military and financial control exerted over
the island by the United States. To further exploit the island, the United States
went so far as to forcibly change Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ 1804 independence
law-forbidding foreigners to own land in Haiti by drafting a new constitution
lifting this ban. When Haiti’s parliament refused to approve this change, the US
Marines dissolved this legislative body “under the nominal authority of the client
government. This charter was later ‘passed’ by an extraconstitutional plebiscite,
in which it is estimated that less than 5 percent of the Haitian population
participated, under an armed guard of marines.”11 This first legal change was the
first in a long line that allowed the United States to appropriate most of Haiti’s
natural resources.
It is within this “surreal” situation dominated by corporate interests and racism
that the contemporary version of the zombie was produced. In 1929, William
Seabrook published a fictional, first-person-narrated pseudo-anthropological
work on Haiti entitled The Magic Island, accompanied by highly racist and
stereotypical engravings that further contributed to the perception of Haiti as an
exotic and dangerous island. In a chapter entitled “. . . Dead Men Working in the
Cane Fields,” he presents the following dialogue between himself and his friend
Polynice:
“At this very moment, in the moonlight, there are zombies working in this island,
less than two hours’ ride from my own habitation. We know about them, but we
do not dare to interfere so long as our own dead are left unmolested. If you will
ride with me tomorrow night, yes, I will show you dead men working in the cane
field. Close even to the cities, there are sometimes zombies. Perhaps you have
already heard of those that were at Hasco . . .” “What about Hasco?” I interrupted
him, for in the whole of Haiti, Hasco is perhaps the last name anybody would
think of connecting with either sorcery or superstition.12

Seabrook’s incredulity, based on the fact that it cannot be possible for the
Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO) to be involved with any “voodoo
nonsense,” shows the racist and patronizing attitude that the American occupation
196 Decolonizing the Undead

promoted.13 It also speaks to a fear of miscegenation that will continually feature

in other instances of the zombie figure in American popular culture.
This is similar to anxieties surrounding cannibalism, exemplified by
explorers’ and colonizers’ fears of being consumed by “mysterious” and “savage”
people met during the US occupation of Haiti. The contact with the island and
its “natives”—the descendants of forcibly displaced and enslaved peoples—
generated new tropes to translate American anxieties. Seabrook’s novel inspired
the 1932 film White Zombie, in which a young white American woman,
Madeleine, is zombified by a “voodoo master” who has fallen in love with her.
Overnight, as a zombie, she leaves her husband, Neil, to follow the call of her
“new master.” Her husband begins to look for her everywhere; when he loses any
hope of finding her, his companion encourages him to keep searching, to which
Neil replies: “Well, surely you don’t think she’s alive, in the hands of natives? Oh
no, better dead than that!”14 Neil’s hope that Madeleine be dead rather than alive
and “in the hands of the natives” reveals how Haiti became a space for the United
States to negotiate “the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. . . .
Since the long occupation, Haiti has continued to serve, in more and less veiled
ways, as a reflection of U.S. American fears and desires, and thus as a salable
commodity.”15 In Seabrook’s novel and the first movies of the 1930s and 1940s
it was the character of the “voodoo master” which was feared, since they had
the power to take over and control any corpse, and thus reminded spectators of
Haiti’s “barbarity” and supposed black magic. Since George Romero’s 1968 Night
of the Living Dead, the dread of the racialized, colonized “other” is displaced
onto the creature of the zombie itself. The figure has continually evolved in
contemporary cinema, sometimes appearing as a quick and violent cannibalistic
drone, and other times being humanized.
Thus, from its origins as a Haitian, black magic, undead worker on the
plantation controlled by an evil master to profit from their labor, the zombie
evolved into a cannibalistic ghoul starring in Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.
In this way, though its characterization changed, its employment did not: it
continued to remain a creature of the market and for the market, to generate
profit for those who control it. It is not a stretch to say that the figure of the
zombie has, in fact, lived the same fate as Haitian sugar, being extracted from
the island in order to be refined and sold on the US marketplace and generating
profit there, far from its original context and meaning. Little is left of the original,
emancipatory figure of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) in most of the
Western contemporary productions in which zombies appear. This is because
the Haitian Revolution itself has been erased from Western historiography in
 From the Mountain to the Shore 197

a neocolonial gesture, with the emancipatory zombie disappearing alongside it

and facilitating the creation of the westernized zombie. Gurminder K. Bhambra
notes how the Haitian Revolution’s long intellectual embargo has endured, as
it is seldom considered alongside those of the United States (1765–91) and
France (1789–99), despite the fact that it embodied global ideals of equality to
a greater extent:
S­ o, what might we learn about the birth of the modern world and its transformation
(and the politics of knowledge production, more generally) if we took the
Haitian revolution seriously? First, in terms of Haiti itself, we would learn about
the ways in which those who had been enslaved, on achieving their freedom and
independence, honoured the people who preceded them on the land. . . . The
Haitian constitution was itself predicated on an understanding of citizenship
that had greater universal applicability than similar notions developed in the
French Revolution. According to Fischer (2004: 266), by making freedom from
enslavement and racial discrimination the bedrock of political understandings
and unlinking citizenship from race, the Haitian constitution radicalized and
universalized the idea of equality. . . . The Haitian revolution was the most radical
of its age and silenced, precisely, for its radical nature.16

Indeed, this “radical nature” did not permit first France and then the United
States to continue to exploit Haiti’s natural resources, so it needed to be silenced
and erased. This is why authors like Gina Athena Ulysse remind us that “Haiti
needs new narratives.”17 Further, the world not only needs new narratives
about the Haitian Revolution but also needs them from a non-Eurocentric
perspective, to conceptually allow us to grasp the central role this insurrection
had in the development of the “modern” world. Modernity continues to be a
term that is challenging to define, though scholars have been attempting to
do so for years. In his 1995 article entitled “The End of What Modernity?”
Immanuel Wallerstein considers our need to “trace the history of [the]
confusing symbiosis of the two modernities—the modernity of technology
and the modernity of liberation” when attempting to articulate this concept.18
Crucially, he later notes:
It was the French Revolution that forced the issue, not merely for France but for
the modern world-system as a whole. The French Revolution was not an isolated
event. It might rather be thought of as the eye of a hurricane. It was bounded
(preceded and succeeded) by the decolonization of the Americas—the settler
decolonizations of British North America, Hispanic America, and Brazil; the
slave revolution of Haiti; and the abortive Native American uprisings such as
Túpac Amaru in Peru.19
198 Decolonizing the Undead

Wallerstein begins to shape his definition of what he calls the “Age of the
Revolutions,” which he further develops in his chapter entitled “The French
Revolution as World-Historical Event” in 2001.20 His association of decolonial
movements with the Haitian Revolution and the Peruvian Túpac Amaru II
rebellion asks whether issues of memorialization and rewriting of history are
not also crucial in the context of this South American country. If one needs to
learn more from the Haitian revolution, could one also aim to learn from the
Peruvian one? Indeed, their similarities and differences make them both global
phenomena in and of the Americas. Moreover, these issues of memory and
rewriting are crucial to the figure of the zombie, as I have argued until now, as
well as for Ortega’s novel, which I will shortly discuss. The next section, though,
briefly contextualizes the role of the Túpac Amaru rebellion in relation to the
short story which itself is focused on an internal strife that took place in the
country about 200 years later.

Indigenous Resistance and Fragmented Corporeality in

Peruvian Hi/Story from Túpac Amaru II to Alfonso Cánepa

The Túpac Amaru II rebellion was the culmination of a wave of insurrections

that took place across the Andes in what is now contemporary Peru and Bolivia
between 1720 and 1790.21 Though this rebellion was the most significant and
largest organized of all these events, it was understood differently by people
living across the Andes at the time, hence, as Alberto Flores Galindo notes, there
“was not just one,. . . but many faces to the rebellion”:
while in Cuzco, his [Túpac Amaru II] proclamations were interpreted to call
for respect for the property and lives of mixed-bloods (mestizos) and creoles
(criollos); in La Paz it was believed that the Inca [as he was called by everyone]
wanted all non-Indians put to death in a kind of ethnic cleansing. . . . In Arequipa
in 1789 and in Oruro in 1781, by contrast, rebel leaders were actually creoles
with urban followers composed of a mix of Indian and mixed-bloods.22

The Inca’s real name was José Gabriel Condorcanqui. He was an indigenous
nobleman who was also a prosperous trader and who claimed direct descent
from the last Inca King, Túpac Amaru, executed in 1572 during the Spanish
Conquista—hence asserting a direct connection between himself and pre-
Hispanic populations. However, as Flores Galindo notes, “Túpac Amaru [II]’s
army replicated the hierarchy of colonial society. In fact, this restoration of the
 From the Mountain to the Shore 199

‘authentic’ Inca monarchy demonstrated the influence of European concepts on

the indigenous aristocracy.”23 This influence translates the fact that the violence
of the Conquista was not just physical and material but also epistemological, as
Inca practices became alienated even as the revolution sought to identify with
the culture. Amaru’s death did not bring forth the end of this insurrection as the
“city of La Paz was taken twice by Julián Apasa Túpac Katari . . . and in June 1781,
Felipe Velasco Túpac Inca . . . tried to organize a rebellion in the mountains of
Huarochirí. . . Only the execution of Diego Cristóbal in August 1783 ended this
convulsive period of Andean rebellion which lasted more than three years.”24
Amaru’s and Cristóbal’s executions were powerful events insofar as the violence
and will to destroy their bodies fragmented Andean identities:
For those who viewed Túpac Amaru as an Inca, however, the body was not
that of a prisoner. Rather, it stood for the Indian nation. To quarter and burn
Túpac Amaru’s body was to destroy symbolically the Inca empire. Years later,
when Diego Cristóbal made peace with the Spaniards, Cristóbal assembled the
supposed remains of Túpac Amaru and with great pomp buried them in Cuzco’s
San Francisco church. Shortly thereafter, however, the Spanish judge Mata
Linares had Cristóbal arrested and condemned him to be hanged. After the
execution, his body was also quartered and his houses sacked and destroyed.25

This violence on Andean bodies has continued, and is registered and represented
by Ortega’s character’s broken corporeality. Moreover, the marginalization
and demonization of Andean groups, languages, practices, and customs
that followed these deaths, in order to curb further rebellions, resembles the
economic, diplomatic, and cultural embargo of Haiti: “On Túpac Amaru’s death,
the colonial authorities prohibited Inca nobility from using titles, ordered the
destruction of paintings of the Incas, and forced the Indians to dress in Western
clothes.”26 This included a rewriting “of history in terms of European superiority,”
as Flores Galindo notes, which, in the Peruvian context, echoes the academic
erasure of the Haitian revolution discussed by Bhambra above.27
Forgetting and occluding these revolutions and their contexts engages with
how the historical archive is shaped by colonial practices. Saidiya Hartman in
her work on the Atlantic trade argues that
the archive dictates what can be said about the past and the kinds of stories that
can be told about the persons catalogued, embalmed, and sealed away in box
files and folios. To read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final
viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave
hold.28
200 Decolonizing the Undead

Furthermore, these “dead” images in the “mortuary” of the archives are akin
to revenant figures, undead zombies, and ghosts. These are signifiers of how
monstrous relations and developments under colonialism were and continue to
be. My emphasis on the adjective monstrous is crucial to the understanding of
the zombie as a monster. As I have argued elsewhere,
S­ cholars have, in general, focused solely on [the] connection of monstrum to
monere: interestingly, none seem to have considered the close etymological
relation that the term “monster” bears with “monument.” Indeed, monere also
means “to remind, bring to one’s recollection,” which is the root for the term
monument, to which the adverbial suffix—mentum is added (“Monster”).
The myriad of terms associated with memory and commemoration implied
in the word is crucial in understanding monstrosity and monstrous figures
as monuments of colonialism. Crucially, monuments play a critical role in
relation to colonisation, being physical reminders of western hegemony. Hence,
monstrous figures . . . can be understood as literary monuments of colonial
relations, signifiers that represent a vestige of this history, and they can be read
as depicting the monumental ruins, or material traces, of colonial pasts and
monstrosity as representing the corporeal embodiment of empire’s violence.29

The zombie embodies this description, and its position at the nexus of the
monstrous and memorializing is emphasized in Ortega’s novel. Julio Ortega’s
Adiós, Ayacucho (1986) traces the journey Alfonso Cánepa undertakes from
Ayacucho to Lima to retrieve some of his missing bones in order to give
himself a proper burial after he is violently mutilated and murdered by the
military police. Once he reaches Lima, Cánepa effectively rewrites the archive
embodied by Francisco Pizzaro’s tomb by fusing his incomplete corpse with the
conquistador’s relics. In this gesture, Cánepa can be seen as setting the historical
record straight on what the archive should contain: a full recounting of events
that does not silence violence but rather recognizes these realities and their
structural, material, and systemic legacies. Cánepa’s character is a revenant that
has been mostly described as a specter; Talía Dajes, for instance, rejects the view
that Cánepa could be interpreted as a zombie, arguing that “while Cánepa’s
representation encompasses some of the elements present in zombie mythology,
it lacks one of its defining components, that is, the total annulment of the self.”30
Her analysis of Cánepa through different layers of Peruvian history and Andean
folklore is crucial; however, reading this character as a zombie permits us to
articulate him as an emancipatory figure. Indeed, as Glover concludes, in respect
to the zombie’s potentiality in the Haitian context and her readings of Depestre’s,
Frankétienne’s, and Alexis’ works, “the zombie functions as a catalyzing
 From the Mountain to the Shore 201

metaphor for considering questions of community-building and alienation in

an economically, politically, and even psychically fractured society”31 and she
also notes that “for the most part . . . [these] are tales of zombies reborn.”32 These
zombies and Cánepa are not simply specters haunting their narratives but are
instilled with agency, taking action to redress injustices and putting themselves
to rest in peace, rather than requiring an exorcism. These are thus zombies
reborn and reburied.

“I came to Lima to recover my corpse”: Memorializing and

Re-Burying the Undead

Ortega’s novel begins by unsettling linear temporality, as the first sentence

is Cánepa’s past tense statement: “Vine a Lima a recobrar mi cadaver” (I
came to Lima to recover my corpse), followed by an explanation noting: “Así
comenzaría mi discurso cuando llegase a Lima” (This is how I would begin my
speech when I would reach Lima).33 As Cánepa emerges from the “pit” where
he has been thrown, after having been mutilated and killed, he prepares the
reader for what he plans to do by the end of the novel: recompose his broken
body and bury himself again to rest in peace. Cánepa’s story thus can only be
told by his undead corpse as he travels across Peru, from the city of Ayacucho
in the Andes to the littoral urban space of Lima, or from the mountains to
the shore. By inverting linear storytelling temporality, Cánepa’s narrative
voice begins by what is closer to his reader’s present, his future, and thus by
signaling the incomplete history we might receive unless he is allowed to tell
his story.
Ortega’s novel is inspired by a journal article he read about the gruesome
and violent torture and mutilation of Jesús Oropeza in 1984, “a peasant activist
from Ayacucho.”34 The novel also engages with the investigative commission
prompted by President Fernando Belaúnde the year before, in February 1983
headed by Mario Vargas Llosa following the murder of eight journalists in
January 1983 in the village of Uchuraccay. As Víctor Vich and Alexandra Hibbett
argue, the attempt to objectively reconstruct the events leading to the death of
the journalists in Uchuraccay was thwarted by stereotypes and preconceived
ideas about Andean indigenous peoples. They argue that despite these attempts,
the commission’s report is “alimented by a very traditional rhetoric, which led
it to judge the events from preestablished ideas about Andean culture and the
complex process of modernity in Perú.”35
202 Decolonizing the Undead

These events, along with the death of 135 community members of Uchuraccay,
principally Quechua indigenous people, are part of a wider period known as the
Manchay tiempo, a hybrid denomination including Manchay, the Quechua word
for fear, followed by the Spanish term for time. This period, which is considered
as lasting from the early 1980s to 2000, was the theater to many violent struggles
between the Marxist-Maoist Guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)
and the military government. Quechua campesinos (peasant farmers) were
often caught in the crossfire, resulting in several violent deaths of indigenous
communities. For this reason, by “the start of the 1990s, the Quechua had started to
establish themselves in defense patrols known as rondas campesinas.”36 In Ortega’s
novel, Cánepa is identified as the leader of one of these patrols, thus identifying the
violence committed against him as an attempt to curb and neutralize indigenous
resistance. Hence, reading his revived corpse as an emancipatory zombie aims to
suggest a de-objectification and de-demonization of Andean groups.
Throughout Ortega’s novel, the irony and humor used to describe Cánepa’s
fragmented body urge the reader to consider the importance of each life and what
happens when marginalized communities are the ones “allowed” to die. This can
only be done, as Victor Quiroz argues, by tackling and challenging the types of
discourse that have been objectifying indigenous people and their culture: “a
carnivalization of the journalistic, indigenista and anthropological discourse is
constructed in Adiós, Ayacucho, which are rhetoric that objectify the Andean
other.”37 By confronting institutionalized discourse that reifies otherness—
that employs techniques and dynamics analogous with those used during
colonial times—Ortega’s novel aims to, first, consider how history is written
and, second, rewrite this archive and, in so doing, decolonizing the writing of
history itself. This is continued when Cánepa decides to complete his skeleton
by taking Pizarro’s bones, which, as Quiroz contends, functions as a deposit
and archive of colonial history and power, noting that because only his bones
remain, “it is a symbol of the decline of the colonial system continued by the
modern criollo Peruvian state.”38 In Hartman’s words, quoted above, the archive
can be considered a mortuary; this idea is materialized in the novel through
Pizarro’s tomb being read as an archive. Both the colonial and the authoritarian
powers leave their victims anonymous and objectified in communal graves and
in sealed files. Cánepa attempts to challenge this history of depersonalization
and objectification by contesting modes of knowledge production through
challenging the characters of the journalist and the anthropologist that appear
in the novel, and also by envisaging a Peruvian body politics and social body that
unifies its origins in Cánepa’s reassembled body.
 From the Mountain to the Shore 203

Cánepa’s fragmented corporeality is a signifier of the violence endured by

indigenous population caught in the crossfire during the Manchay Tiempo—
despite their constitution of defense patrol, Quechua communities remained
the principal victims of this period—and the fragmented social body of Peru.
Furthermore, as Mónica Cárdenas Moreno notes, Cánepa represents indigenous
migrants displaced to Lima due to this violence and who bring with them the deep
traumas accompanying this violence.39 Robin Kirk notes that “until the 1940s,
more than half of Peru’s population lived in the Andes. . . . By 1981 the proportion
of Peruvian living in the Andes had fallen to 36 percent.”40 Cánepa’s travel from
Ayacucho to Lima can also be seen as referring back to the journey undertaken by
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, a Quechua nobleman, who wrote El primer nueva
corónica y buen gobierno between 1600 to 1615, addressed to King Philip III,
critiquing Spanish colonial rule and its impact on the indigenous populations.41
Here rewriting history becomes crucial, as Cárdenas Moreno notes, given that
his mission came to be symbolic over the centuries, though it was not fruitful
in his own time, and “Cánepa’s pilgrimage also seeks a symbolic transformation,
the resignification of history: attacking the center of power and its history, which
is to say, Lima and the bones of conquistador Francisco Pizarro.”42 The novel
challenges both the colonial historical archive and the official national one
established by the government. In one of his speeches, Cánepa considers how
rapidly one dies in “this country”:
La verdadera historia nacional sería este cuento de las variaciones en la matanza
en los mataderos de turno. Cada estilo de matar señalaría una época, cada muerto
ilustre (Atahualpa, Túpac Amaru, José Olaya, Alfonso Ugarte, Atusparia, y tantos
otros), pero también cada muerto anónimo, da cuenta de su cuerpo condenado y
torturado, y, en esto tiempos de guerra sucia, desaparecido después de despedazado.
Este cementerio nacional es un velar sin término, un luto del alma.43
[The true national history should be a recounting of slaughtering variations
and of slaughterers on shift. Each style of killing would signify an epoch, each
famous dead (Atahualpa, Túpac Amaru, José Olaya, Alfonso Ugarte, Atusparia,
and many others), but also each anonymous dead, would relate their condemned
and tortured body, and, in these times of dirty war, each disappeared would
come after each broken body. This national cemetery is an endless wake, a
mourning of the soul.]

Here Cánepa considers a genealogy of death which connects the Peruvian

colonial past with the violent present of the Manchay tiempo. In a gesture
redolent of the necropolitics theorized by Achille Mbembe, he also rhetorically
aligns anonymous deaths with those of famous people, reminding readers that
204 Decolonizing the Undead

each death, and life, is important and hence re-sensitizing them to mass killings.
Cánepa, representing the broken body of Peru, also represents its scarred history
and in trying to reassemble his skeleton seeks reparations.44 Cánepa thus finally
creates a space in which what Judith Butler has called “ungrievable lives” are
finally mourned in their death, including his own.45
The novel rewrites the historical archive seeking to repair the psychological
and socioeconomic and environmental scars of colonialism, which never
truly disappear, in the novel’s attempt to offer a political ecology through
Cánepa’s claim that Peruvian economists “han saldado el país al extranjero, y
lo han hecho sin remordimientos, con una convicción absoluta” (have sold the
country to foreigners, and they have done so without remorse and with absolute
conviction).46 This statement and Cánepa’s broken corporeality in the novel
echo Eduardo Galeano’s seminal work Las venas abierta de América Latina
(The Open Veins of Latin America) and its understanding of Latin America as
a body fragmented by colonial and (neo-)imperial endeavors. Moreover, when
Cánepa cannot find his own bones, he decides to complete his body by taking
the colonizer’s bones in Fernando Pizarro’s tomb, or, as described in Spanish, the
“monument.”47 Here the narrative explicitly situates the broken corporeality of
Cánepa in relation to the colonial past and its consequences. Cánepa’s claim feels
even more real given the current environmental situation in Peru. In particular,
given the water crisis the country is encountering, which is exacerbated by export
monocrop asparagus agriculture and by (illegal) gold mining, as both industries
“require significant amounts of increasingly scarce water.”48 In the Peruvian
Andes, illegal alluvial gold mining impacts not only the environment but also
indigenous communities, predominantly Quechua and Aymara, as the bulk
of this activity takes place “within a nature reserve that is home to indigenous
peoples and huge biodiversity,” causing it to be classified as illegal, but it also
contributes to increased number of forced sexual and labor exploitation.49 In the
case of the Madre de Dios mines, for instance, “majority of those trafficked or
exploited hail from the Cusco region.”50

Conclusion: Why the Andes, and Zombies, Need

New Narratives

It is more crucial than ever then to decolonize narratives surrounding indigenous

groups in order to avoid situations in which they continue to be most vulnerable
to exploitative industries and the environmental impacts these have. Andean
 From the Mountain to the Shore 205

cultures and spaces need to be de-objectified to conceive them as more than a

space from which to extract resources. Similarly, by decolonizing the zombie
and providing new narratives for this figure, one can attempt to return it its
emancipatory power and recognize its role in a crucial Revolution that makes
Haiti more than a space of victimhood, exploitation, or monstrosity, as noted by
Ulysse in Why Haiti Needs New Narratives.

Notes

1 I am grateful to those whose precious input and feedback have greatly improved
this chapter, in particular Roxanne Douglas and Matthew Chennells.
2 All translations are mine unless specified otherwise.
3 Glover, Haiti Unbound, 60.
4 Oloff, “From Sugar to Oil,” 326.
5 I’d like to thank Harry Pitt Scott, who helped me formulate this thought in a PhD
chapter on extractivism and I now realize it fits this work better.
6 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 36–7.
7 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 37.
8 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 303–4.
9 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 79.
10 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 118.
11 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 119.
12 Seabrook, The Magic Island, 94–5, emphasis in original.
13 In this instance specifically, as in other below, I use the Americanized spelling of vaudou
to distinguish this negative view of the syncretic religion as black magic from its reality.
14 “White Zombie,” n.p.
15 Renda, Taking Haiti, 215.
16 Bhambra, “Undoing the Epistemic Disavowal of the Haitian Revolution,” 7.
17 Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives.
18 Wallerstein, “The End of What Modernity?,” 472.
19 Wallerstein, “The End of What Modernity?,” 474.
20 Wallerstein, “The French Revolution as World-Historical Event.”
21 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 159.
22 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 160–1.
23 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 164.
24 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 160.
25 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 166.
26 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 166.
27 Flores Galindo, “The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru,” 167.
206 Decolonizing the Undead

28 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 17.

29 Champion, “Imperialism Is a Plague too: Transatlantic Pandemic Imaginaries
in César Mba Abogo’s ‘El sueño de Dayo’ (2007) and Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro’
(2012),” 170.
30 Dajes, “Peru’s Living Dead,” 6.
31 Glover, “Exploiting the Undead,” 121.
32 Glover, “Exploiting the Undead,” 108.
33 Ortega, Adiós, Ayacucho, 9.
34 Cala Buendía, “Truth in the Time of Fear: Adiós, Ayacucho’s Poetics of Memory and
the Peruvian Transitional Justice Process,” 348.
35 Vich and Hibbett, “La risa irónica de un cuerpo roto,” 176–7.
36 Williams, Indigenous Peoples, 899, emphasis in original.
37 Quiroz, “La carnavalización del archivo en Adiós, Ayacucho de Julio Ortega,” 41.
38 Quiroz, “La carnavalización del archivo en Adiós, Ayacucho de Julio Ortega,” 57.
39 Cárdenas Moreno, “Ruptura del cuerpo y ruptura del lenguaje en la novela de la
memoria histórica en el Perú,” 25.
40 Kirk, “Chaqwa,” 370–1.
41 See Beardsell, Europe and Latin America, 56–8.
42 Cárdenas Moreno, “Ruptura del cuerpo y ruptura del lenguaje en la novela de la
memoria histórica en el Perú,” 22.
43 Ortega, Adiós, Ayacucho, 15–16.
44 Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre, 262.
45 See Butler, Frames of War.
46 Ortega, Adiós, Ayacucho, 33.
47 Ortega, Adiós, Ayacucho, 64.
48 O’Connell, From a Vicious to a Virtuous Circle, 7.
49 O’Connell, From a Vicious to a Virtuous Circle, 19.
50 O’Connell, From a Vicious to a Virtuous Circle, 20.

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violencia política, edited by Juan Carlo Ubilluz, Víctor Vich and Alexandra Hibbett,
175–89. Lima: Institudo de Estudios Peruanos, 2009.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The End of What Modernity?” Theory and Society 24, no. 4
(1995): 471–88.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The French Revolution as World-Historical Event.” In
Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, edited by
Immanuel Wallerstein, 7–23. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
“White Zombie (1932) Movie Script.” https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_
script.php?movie=white-zombie. Accessed March 6, 2020.
Williams, Victoria R. Indigenous Peoples: An Encyclopedia of Culture, History, and
Threats to Survival. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2020.
 Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice:
An Afterword
Stephen Shapiro

An afterword to a collection of essays seems like a metonymic equivalent to

a zombie. Caught indeterminately between the vibrant stuff of the prior
arguments and delaying a final release for the reader, the afterword often feels
like its main function is to remind readers of that cinematic rule about dealing
with the undead, never forget the double-tap. In the spirit of self-determination
and tacheles (the Yiddish word for straight talk or no bullshit), I don’t wish here
to offer a prophylactic summary or condensation of the preceding arguments,
preferring to let our authors speak for themselves, but instead wish to speak
firstly about the politics driving the call to decolonize the undead through
cultural commentary. In one of its most basic forms, the call to decolonize the
arts and humanities seeks to move beyond the idea of democratic enlargement,
the notion that if we offer a more diverse reading list, then all will be well and the
scars of the past can be forgotten. Instead, any effort to decolonize culture means
forcing ourselves to examine how we came to make differentiating evaluations
in the first place. In this way, even the most Eurocentric syllabus needs to be
as carefully probed for its sins of omission as for its sins of commission, the
structure of its silences and erasures as much for its casual bigotries.
Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) offers one
way forward through its complex use of the term “wake.”1 Sharpe suggests an
entanglement with the traumatic legacy of Atlantic slavery, the wake of the ship
carrying those in the Middle Passage of the flesh trade; a funeral wake, where
a community gives testimony and tribute to the passed, while also taking care
to nurture each other in a moment of sharp pain and sense of injustice; and
a sense of heightened political consciousness, an awakening through cognitive
transformation resulting in what today we call being “woke.”
210 Decolonizing the Undead

Previous studies of the material often placed in the categories of Gothic,

Horror, and the Weird (GoHoW) could be thought of as a sort of cultural
entomology, where we squashed the bug of bourgeois narrative to see what
oozed out. Today, a new mood has arisen as the genres that often seemed
dedicated to “othering” have become taken up by those groups of readers
and writers previously marginalized by these narratives (women, non-whites,
nonheterosexuals, and trans) as a means for the kind of remembering,
restoration, and redistribution in the way that Sharpe suggests. Is there a way
that this new cultural movement can decolonize even those on the previously
dominant side of the equation? What if, though, Sharpe’s study had to mean
something even for those who do not consider themselves to be the implied
readers or inheritors of this tragic penumbra? What if the decolonial impulse
was as fundamentally necessary, as basically constitutive, as a prior dedication
to universal human rights? I want to argue, unsurprisingly perhaps, that the
answer is yes, and that there’s much ground to till here.
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol
Clover introduced the now widespread concept of the “final girl,” the “boyish,”
female-identified sole survivor, and deliverer of vengeful justice against pursuing
and torturing figure(s).2 While many readers today use this term to convey the
staging of feminist empowerment, this was not Clover’s main interest in the
monograph. Instead, through a series of contemporaneous field observation
of cinema audiences for 1980s slasher films, Clover noticed that the primary
fanbase seemed to be men. Clover then suggested that the attraction of these
films was not mainly to provide a voyeuristic and misogynist opportunity to
relish in the denuded female body in pain but to create a new kind of audience
affiliation. The study’s hypothesis was that a male audience identified with the
final girl because they saw themselves in her tribulations. This was a viewer
who might have easily himself been bullied having failed to achieve dominant
ideals of muscular, heterosexual masculinity. And for male Americans in a time
of renewed Reaganesque Rambo-ism, the final girl was their representational
device to express their own, perhaps not entirely politicized, discontent.
In our own neoliberal times, the zombie seems to often function similarly as
a paradoxical figure of release. In a phase where authorities tell us to celebrate
the anxiety of risk, amid their destruction of state welfare schemes of protection
in times of unemployment and health crisis, becoming a zombie seems like a
good option. For zombies no longer need to worry about bodily crisis, wage
precarity, or bullying over not having the right dress style or physical shape.
Zombies, after all, seem to be the only ones nowadays who have the opportunity
 Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice: An Afterword 211

to hang out with each other, free from the pressures of either waged work or
social media’s narcissistic transactionalism. The challenge, however, is to find a
way to articulate this desire for escape from contemporary capitalism by white
Euro-Americans with the wake-work of historical awareness about imperialism,
colonialism, and domestic racial privilege. Can the undead also decolonize us?
One example here might seem counterintuitive to this collection’s project:
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Romero’s film remains
canonized as a threshold event for zombie curation, not least as it transforms
zombies from being figures of coerced production under the will of a despotic
master into (neoliberal) ones driven by insatiable consumption without any
state-like control whatsoever. And while Romero claims to have been unaware
of the film’s transgression of cinematic segregation, by using a Black male lead
(Duane Jones) whose character insists on being acknowledged as the leader
on top, consigning white bullies to the basement, Night of the Living Dead,
nonetheless, captures the spirit of late 1960s racial tensions.
Romero’s film also registers and helps constitute a break from the industrial
legacy of liberal media regulation. For the two main institutional forces driving
American cinema in the twentieth century were the onset of the Hays Code,
which morally policed the classic Hollywood studio system, and the 1948
Supreme Court case United States v. Paramount Pictures, which broke the
studios’ monopolistic control by forcing them to sell their cinemas, thus ending
control of the entire chain of filmic production and distribution.
The Motion Picture Production Code, usually called the Hays code after
its primary author Will H. Hays, was a self-imposed mechanism wherein
the studios voluntarily censored their narrative content and filmic form. The
Code contains both a theoretical section and a prescriptive list of prohibited
narrative elements. The theoretical section interestingly hews closely to many
of the cultural industry arguments later associated with the Frankfurt School.
Film is considered necessary to have guidelines because the form is dangerous
to social regulation and hierarchies. Hays argued that while prior art forms were
class segregated, cinema dangerously brings all together, wherein intermingling
might dissolve the prior class separations on which American society depends,
despite its rhetoric of democratic universalism. Moreover, film distribution
allows rural audiences to hear and see the modernizing social transformations
that urban coastal (and international) communities were experiencing, in
ways that even radio, with its tightly controlled broadcast reach limits, was
not capable of accomplishing. The Hays Code felt that farming regions, still
necessary for a United States before agro-capitalism began massifying farms
212 Decolonizing the Undead

and internationalizing food circulation, had to be protected against a disturbing

awareness of social changes to life expectations and interaction happening
elsewhere. In this spirit of paternalism, the Hays Code then provided an explicit
checklist of what studios were not allowed to do. Its power stands as an example
of how conservative coalitions emerge, as the old joke goes that Jewish studio
heads hired Catholic Hays to tell them what could be shown to Protestant
audiences. In any case, it is conventional to note the difference between pre-code
and classic Hollywood studio films, not least for their bringing to an end to the
spate of horror films that arose during the 1930s.
United States v. Paramount, however, helped begin the end of Hays, since
it meant that the studios could no longer entirely control what was being
shown onscreen. The anti-monopoly law eventually provided the foundation
for independent and art-house cinemas that could now show nonstudio films
without retribution. Consequently, European and international films began to
be more easily seen by American audiences, provided they were in the handful
of cities with an art-house cinema. Given that European artists were more willing
to violate the Hays Code, which exemplified American puritanism, United States
v. Paramount let the cat out of the bag as it facilitated the importation of films
that did not play by Hays’ rules. The decreasing power of the Code meant that
the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) introduced a film rating
system in 1968 that sought to discourage, but no longer disallow, content that
Hays had forbidden.
It is thus no accident that Night of the Living Dead appears in the same year
as the end of Hays. The Code’s list of what films should not do provides a neat
checklist of what happens in Romero’s film, as if one of the main motivations was
to persistently violate everything named in the Code. No nudity? Then let’s have
a brief, mid-length shot of a naked female ghoul. Nothing that challenges the
final harmony of the nuclear family? Then let’s have mommy and daddy eaten by
their monster-child, and so on. In this way, Romero’s film changed up the rules
of mid-century zombies to break the structure of what was considered “normal”
for a film in order to prod viewers to consider what they had not previously—the
force of cultural policing by a nonstate structure. But if Romero’s zombie was
culturally dissident, can we claim it as likewise politically radical, as helping to
engineer anti-capitalist revolution? In other words, is it decolonial?
In Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution, Michael
Denning suggests that throughout the 1920s, before the Great Depression, a
material convergence of new sound technologies and a large-scale investment
in shipping yards throughout the world brought hinterland peoples into
 Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice: An Afterword 213

harbor cities where their traditional music encountered modernizing urban

conditions to produce new kinds of popular music.3 This act of revivifying folk
tunes in new scorings exemplifies what I have called a curation, rather than a
tradition, of culture. Denning then argues that this sonic transformation was
not simply contained within a particular nation but was internationalizing, as
portable records and playing devices were carried from one port to another,
so that previously regionalized ethnic groups could hear each other’s cultural
expressions of their analogous experiences in historically new ways. Denning
suggests that these new records provided the soundtrack and back tempo to the
emergence of independence movements that may have often been nationalistic
but were often aware of a shared non-Eurocentric lifeworld, a decolonial one.
I want to suggest that something similar might be happening today with
zombie figurations. On the one hand, we are experiencing something akin
to the old studio system as the streaming services, like Netflix and Amazon,
are recapturing control of production and distribution in ways similar to the
conditions of pre-United States v. Paramount. And like the classic studios’
need for a constant stream of content for their cinemas, which resulted in the
normalization of the swiftly made and lightly financed “B-films,” the category
for most horror films, the streaming services require much larger amounts of
content creation. On the other hand, unlike the studio system that protected
American audiences from seeing international content, the streaming services
have vastly eased access to foreign material. Indeed, without the rise of digital,
internet resources, from the ease of piracy to the streaming services, many of
this collection’s authors would not have had access to the sources they consider.
And zombie films, with their speechless characters, are a genre that is easily
internationalized, since subtitles are not as necessary. Indeed, one could possibly
enjoy a non-English zombie film even without any translation at all.
If the new networks of cultural consumption are replicating the conditions of
musical exchange that Denning suggests were the prelude to anti-colonial and
anti-imperialist politics, then the question we might want to ask is, if the same is
true for the zombie today?

Notes

1 Sharpe, In the Wake.

2 Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws.
3 Denning, Noise Uprising.
214 Decolonizing the Undead

Works Cited

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Denning, Michael. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution.
London: Verso, 2015.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2016.
 ­ Contributors

Cécile Accilien is Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at

Kennesaw State University in Georgia. She specializes in Caribbean Literature
and Cultures. Her publication includes Rethinking Marriage in Francophone
African and Caribbean Literatures (2008), coeditor of Revolutionary Freedoms:
A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (2006), Just Below
South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (2007), and
Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (2021). She is coauthor
of English-Haitian Creole Phrasebook (2010) and Francophone Cultures through
Film (2013). Her work is also in the Journal of Haitian Studies and Women,
Gender and Families of Color.

Giulia Champion is Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Centre at the

University of Essex and Research Assistant at the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Her research investigates decolonial
theory, Latin American studies, extractivism, and the blue humanities. She is
the coeditor of Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction (2020) and editor of
Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There (2021). She has also
coedited two journal special issues forthcoming in 2022 on “Animal Futurity”
with Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and on “Intersections of Activism and
Academia” with the Bulletin of Latin American Research.

Roxanne Douglas is Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick in the English

and Comparative Literary Studies Department. She specializes in feminist
approaches to the Gothic, aiming to decolonize our contemporary understanding
of the genre using world literary studies. She has recently published a paper
“Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers
and ghosts” (2021). Roxanne also regularly gives public lectures on her research
as part of the “Romancing the Gothic” project.

Rebecca Duncan is Research Fellow at the Linnaeus University Centre for

Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (Sweden), where she
coordinates the “Aesthetics of Empire” Research Cluster. Her first monograph,
216 ­ Contributor

South African Gothic (2018), was shortlisted for the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith prize,
and her recent work appears in the journals ARIEL and Science Fiction Film and
Television, and in collections for University of Minnesota Press, Routledge and
Palgrave. She is the coeditor of Patrick McGrath and His Worlds (2020) and the
Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023), and also of “The Body Now”
(2020), a special issue of Interventions. Her guest-edited special issue of Gothic
Studies—“Decolonizing Gothic”—is forthcoming in 2022. Rebecca is recipient
of a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Project Grant (2021–4).

Fiona Farnsworth is Early Career Researcher and Associate Fellow based at the
University of Warwick between the Department of English and Comparative
Literary Studies and the Institute of Advanced Study. Her doctoral research
focused on foodways in contemporary women’s literatures of migration between
sub-Saharan Africa and the United States, reading food as a site which shapes—
and is shaped by—struggles surrounding identity and power within the modern
world-system. She is working currently at the intersection of food studies,
world-literature, and environmental humanities, exploring issues of food justice
and food sovereignty in literary and cultural production.

Frank Jacob is Professor of Global History at Nord Universitet, Norway. He

received his PhD in Japanese studies from Erlangen University, Germany, in
2012. Before joining Nord Universitet, he held positions at Würzburg University,
Germany, and the City University of New York (QCC). Jacob is author or editor
of more than eighty books and his research foci include Japanese Film, revolution
theory, and transatlantic radicalism.

Elizabeth Kelly is currently a faculty member at Florida Polytechnic University.

Her work on literary connections across boundaries of language, geography,
and culture and the formations of identity in nineteenth-century Caribbean
works was recently published in Caribbean Literature in Transition: 1800–
1920. Her research considers the multidirectional influence of early American
and Caribbean texts and focuses primarily on the roles of embodiment and
disembodiment in literatures that resist, reimagine, and reassert notions of
sovereignty in these settings.

Abhirup Mascharak is currently pursuing his PhD at Jadavpur University,

Kolkata, India. His areas of interest include adaptation studies, popular literature,
and queer studies. His recent publications include the essays “Humorous Afterlives
 ­ Contributor 217

of a Keatsian Epiphany” in Middle Flight 5 no. 1 (2016), “Architects of Their Own

Peripherality: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Its Hindi Film Adaptations” in
Middle Flight 6 no. 1 (2017), and (in coauthorship with Prodosh Bhattacharya)
“‘Wilde desire’ across Cultures: Dracula and Its Bengali Adaptations” in Imperial
Maladies: Literatures on Healthcare and Psychoanalysis in India (2018).

Netty Mattar currently teaches English literature at the International Islamic

University of Malaysia (IIUM). She has also taught at the National University of
Singapore, where she completed her PhD. Her current research interests include
contemporary and global speculative fiction, posthumanism, decolonization,
and literary representations of trauma.

Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and comparative literary

studies at the University of Warwick. Author or editor of seventeen books,
his most recent publications include Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los
Angeles, and World-Systems Culture (2017), with Philip Barnard, and Cambridge
Companion to American Horror (2022), edited with Mark Storey.

Josephine Taylor has just recently completed her PhD in comparative literature
and culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also teaches
philosophy and politics. Her research focuses on the intersection of petrocultures
and animal studies, exploring the nonhuman’s place in histories of extraction
and energy. She is member of the Beyond Gender Research collective and has
published collectively with them on queer theory and science fiction. She is a
guest editor for a special issue on “Transdisciplinary Approaches to Climate
Justice” for Sociální studia/Social Studies.

Thomas Waller teaches at the University of Nottingham in the Department of

Modern Languages and Cultures. His interests include world-systems analysis,
materialist theories of world literature, the environmental humanities, and
Marxist critical theory. His research has appeared in journals such as Modern
Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, African Identities, and Critique.
 Index

anthropocene 78, 85, 88, 147, 156, 157 110, 111, 120, 124, 126, 134, 163,
anthropology 4, 5, 12, 43, 44, 49, 51, 157, 170, 185, 192, 200, 204, 211
175, 195, 202 see also imperialism
apocalypse 6, 30, 37, 38, 65, 72, 74, 80, 83, contagion 10, 12, 75, 77, 78, 79, 97
150, 167, 178, 179, 191 control 6, 8, 9, 21, 25, 30, 32, 42, 43, 44, 48,
61, 64, 76, 78, 81, 82, 92, 101, 107,
body 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 122, 123, 127, 131, 132, 133, 147,
25, 26, 27, 34, 35, 49, 50, 65, 66, 76, 159, 161, 163, 170, 180, 188, 195,
78, 79, 82, 88, 91, 97, 107, 121, 123, 196, 211, 212, 213
124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, Costa, Pedro 9, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111,
133, 135, 137, 145, 146, 150, 151, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119,
152, 153, 154, 159, 163, 164, 165, 120, 217
166, 167, 168, 171, 189, 195, 199, Couldry, Nick 4, 11, 12, 40, 41, 55, 56, 71,
201, 202, 203, 204, 210, 216 124, 125, 126, 134, 135, 136
crisis 4, 8, 9, 10, 26, 44, 47, 75, 82, 89, 90, 91,
Cameroon 8, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102,
102, 104, 114, 183 103, 104, 105, 116, 117, 129, 130, 150,
Cape Verde 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 157, 182, 191, 192, 193, 204, 210
116, 117, 119
capitalism 4, 8, 11, 12, 32, 40, 41, 55, 56, Dayan, Joan 1, 11, 12, 15, 22, 23, 25, 27,
70, 75, 82, 83, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 28, 29, 171, 174, 193, 194, 205, 207
104, 107, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, Deckard, Sharae 75, 87, 106, 110, 118, 156,
124, 136, 137, 157, 174, 211 157
Caribbean 2, 6, 7, 34, 36, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, decolonial 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 40, 41, 45, 52,
55, 87, 107, 108, 112, 120, 142, 146, 53, 55, 74, 76, 80, 141, 142, 145,
158, 160, 215, 216 148, 162, 193, 198, 210, 212, 213
see also Haiti ­decoloniality 41, 45, 142
see also Martinique decolonization 2, 9, 45, 67, 75, 76, 77,
CDC (Center for Disease Control) 30 79, 142, 145, 147, 153, 154, 168, 197
cinema 9, 10, 39, 48, 52, 53, 55, 61, 69, 70, decolonize 1, 10, 11, 40, 41, 45, 55, 68,
71, 72, 97, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 193, 204, 209, 210
114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, decolonizing 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 40, 45, 52,
128, 176, 178, 179, 180, 185, 186, 145, 152, 202, 205, 209, 216
187, 189, 196, 209, 210, 211, 212, see also colonialism
213 see also empire
see also film see also imperialism
see also Netflix see also indigenous
see also TV see also postcolonial
climate change 96, 99, 100, 101, 141, 193, Dessalines, Jean Jacques 8, 15, 16, 17, 18,
207 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 47, 195
colonialism 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, Dunham, Katherine 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 49, 50,
40, 41, 66, 67, 68, 73, 78, 83, 84, 51, 56
 Index 219

empire 4, 28, 29, 43, 62, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, Gómez-Barris, Macarena 74, 75, 85, 87
160, 161, 162, 171, 173, 174, 199, see also extractivism
200, 215
Europe 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 36, 43, 44, 45, 50, 53, Haiti 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19,
76, 80, 89, 107, 111, 113, 116, 120, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
127, 147, 162, 163, 170, 194, 195, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 46, 47,
199, 206, 212 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 64, 70, 73,
extractivism 4, 8, 74, 75, 76, 77, 70, 80, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 93, 107,
81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 99, 147, 150, 192, 125, 126, 127, 129, 133, 146, 147,
193, 205, 215, 217 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 169, 170,
171, 173, 174, 191, 192, 193, 194,
Fanon, Frantz 151, 156, 157 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206,
fascism 63 207, 215
feminism 48, 121, 123, 126, 133, 134, 135, Halperin, Victor 6, 31, 37, 38, 108, 137,
137, 138 175
film 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 31, 32, 35, 37, 47, 48,
49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, 65, I Walked With a Zombie 8, 31, 32, 40, 47,
66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 88, 90, 97, 99, 48, 52, 53, 55, 108, 111, 112, 113,
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 128
114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, India 6, 9, 36, 43, 108, 120, 176, 177, 178,
127, 128, 132, 160, 161, 170, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185,
177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 198, 199, 216,
184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 217
196, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, imperialism 1, 31, 36, 37, 40, 44, 48, 52,
216, 217 62, 67, 71, 75, 77, 80, 85, 108, 160,
see also cinema 161, 171, 173, 193, 204, 206, 207,
see also Netflix 211, 213, 217
see also TV see also colonialism
flesh 74, 78, 79, 80, 98, 122, 129, 130, see also empire
131, 150, 163, 164, 166, 189, ­indigenous 2, 5, 24, 32, 41, 52, 84, 91, 93,
209 107, 124, 145, 148, 184, 188, 193,
folklore 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 34, 46, 49, 50, 63, 71, 198, 199, 202, 204, 206, 208
90, 92, 95, 126, 127, 141, 157, 159,
173, 200 Japan 6, 8, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
food 33, 127, 129, 180, 212, 216 70, 71, 72, 73, 216
France 16, 19, 28, 43, 44, 45, 46, 112, 117,
119, 194, 197 labor 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 18, 34, 35, 36, 41, 47, 76,
83, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116,
gender 6, 26, 39, 48, 49, 106, 122, 124, 130, 117, 126, 127, 127, 133, 143, 147,
133, 134, 141, 143, 165, 196, 210, 148, 149, 160, 192, 194, 196, 204
214, 215, 217 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 27, 29,
global 4, 6, 10, 29, 30, 40, 41, 44, 45, 52, 38, 39, 56, 64, 70, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85,
57, 64, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 86, 87, 88, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104,
97, 99, 100, 119, 120, 125, 137, 122, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137,
141, 143, 147, 157, 160, 162, 170, 144, 145, 154, 155, 157, 171, 174,
174, 192, 197, 198, 206, 215, 216, 190
217 liberalism 8, 9, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
globalization 4, 8, 9, 10, 73, 170, 176, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 79, 80, 81,
178, 186 84, 87, 106, 109, 111, 116, 117, 118,
220 Index

119, 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, Ortega, Julio 10, 193, 198, 199, 200, 201,
133, 138, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 202, 206, 207, 208
178, 186, 210, 211 otherness 1, 34, 170, 194, 202
see also neoliberalism
Louverture, Toussaint 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, Peru 10, 191, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200,
21, 22, 27, 28, 29 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208
petrol 75, 77, 79, 83, 104, 192
Magic Island, The 7, 8, 31, 48, 107, 159, see also extractivism
195 see also oil
see also William B. Seabrook Pick, Anat 75, 78, 80, 82, 85, 86, 88
Martinique 4 postcolonial 6, 8, 9, 40, 41, 45, 55, 57, 87,
Marx, Karl 42, 57, 91, 202, 217 89, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113,
Mejias, Ulises A. 4, 11, 12, 56, 71, 124, 115, 119, 120, 142, 147, 207, 215
125, 126, 134, 135, 136 posthumanism 9, 86, 87, 88, 122, 141, 144,
menopause 121, 124, 130, 133, 134, 135, 145, 154, 155, 158, 217
136, 137
Miéville, China 8, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, race 4, 8, 9, 12, 21, 22, 30, 32, 34, 36, 39,
86, 87 42, 47, 51, 72, 106, 107, 116, 129,
Moore, Jason W. 91, 102, 104, 143, 144, 135, 136, 141, 143, 152, 161, 196,
147, 155, 157, 158 197
­Romero, George 4, 32, 37, 39, 51, 63, 87,
nationalism 44, 62, 66, 70, 71, 72, 116, 88, 97, 105, 121, 137, 174, 178, 187,
212, 213 192, 196, 207, 211, 212
Negarestani, Reza 8, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81,
84, 86, 87 Saadawi, Ahmad 9, 159, 162, 163, 164,
neoliberalism 9, 40, 44, 87, 106, 109, 111, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172,
116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 173, 175
127, 128, 129, 133, 138, 147, 148, samurai 8, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
149, 150, 151, 210, 211 70, 71, 73
Netflix 6, 9, 10, 67, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, Santa Clarita Diet 9, 121, 122, 123, 124,
130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 135, 136, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133,
137, 213 134, 135, 137
see also cinema Seabrook, William B. 6, 7, 8, 31, 37, 39, 48,
see also film 107, 159, 160, 166, 171, 175, 177,
see also TV 189, 190, 195, 196, 196, 205, 207
Niblett, Michael 102, 104 Sharpe, Christina 2, 11, 12, 209, 210, 213,
Nkweti, Nana 8, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 214
98, 101, 102, 103, 104 slavery 1, 2, 7, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38,
Ntshanga, Masande 9, 142, 146, 148, 149, 46, 47, 53, 54, 55, 57, 64, 72, 78, 80,
150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158 83, 86, 87, 97, 107, 126, 174, 192,
193, 207, 209
oil 8, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, sexuality 9, 182, 186, 196
84, 85, 87, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, South Africa 9, 52, 93, 104, 141, 142, 146,
103, 104, 105, 130, 161, 192, 205, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157,
207 158, 215, 216
see also extractivism
see also petrol Tourneur, Jacques 37, 39, 52, 53, 54, 108,
Oloff, Kerstin 75, 85, 87, 91, 102, 105, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 137
118, 120, 146 147, 155, 156, 158, Tuck, Eve 4, 11, 12, 67, 71, 73, 168, 178
192, 205, 207 TV 37, 64, 131, 137
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utopia 85, 87, 122, 157 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 146,
160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 171,
vampire 1, 94, 137, 157 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182,
virus 10, 86, 88, 93, 100, 152, 154 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190,
Covid-19 10, 12 194, 196, 197, 199, 200
Voodoo 6, 7, 31, 32 White Zombie 6, 8, 31, 32, 35, 36, 46, 48,
see also Vodou 63, 108, 128, 160, 161, 196
Vodou 3, 7, 16, 20, 26, 30, 31, 35, 46, 47, world-ecology 87, 91, 92, 93, 101, 102,
48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 107, 108, 112, 104, 105
113, 128, 159, 193, 194 Wynter, Sylvia 76, 80, 85, 88, 141, 142,
see also Voodoo 143, 144, 148, 152, 153, 155, 158

Wallerstein, Immanuel 41, 42, 55, 56, 57, Yang, K. Wayne 4, 11, 12, 67, 71, 73
109, 118, 120, 197, 198, 205, 208 Yusoff, Kathryn 76, 77, 78, 79, 85, 88
west 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29,
30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, Zombi 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 17, 93, 193
47, 49, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, see also Jean Zombi
70, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 89, 92, 93, Zombi, Jean 22, 194
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