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6
which the zombie has been put in U.S. popular culture reveals that the dead have a
tremendous amount of political power within the world of the living, and as the zombie
shows, that power may support dominant institutions, serve to question them, or both,
often within the same text.
THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO
In 1937 Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits observed,
More than any other single term, the word ‘voodoo’ is called to mind
whenever mention is made of Haiti… Not only has emphasis been placed
on its frenzied rites and the cannibalism supposed on occasion to
accompany them, but its dark mysteries of magic and ‘zombis’ have been
so stressed that it has become customary to think of the Haitians as living
in a universe of psychological terror.10
Herskovits’s quip about the American proclivity to think of Haiti only in terms of
“voodoo,” and at that, a voodoo imagined as the harbor of every sort of boogeyman, is a
potent reminder that the Haiti of the American imagination is a construct far removed
from Haitian reality. At the same time, Herskovits’s comment underlines how Haiti,
voodoo, and the zombie, were (and are) interrelated in U.S. popular culture: to many,
Haiti was (and is) a land of voodoo, and voodoo is a superstition that produces zombies.
Moreover, the zombie, as it entered the United States—both in popular culture and
academic works—was intimately tied to Haiti and voodoo, and as I will argue in Chapter
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10 Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (1937; reprint, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers,
2007), 139.
Object Description
| Title | And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death |
| Author | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Author email | ckee@usc.edu; ckee211@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies) |
| School | School of Cinematic Arts |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-03-08 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-05-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Marez, Curtis |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kinder, Marsha Hoskins, Janet |
| Abstract | In October 2009, five pale, blood-stained teenagers sat on a curb in Newhall, California. They were not crime victims nor movie extras. Rather, these teens were “zombies,” waiting to participate in a Zombie Walk. These events, where groups of people dressed as zombies lumber through the streets, have been happening globally since 2001 and entice up to several thousand participants for each walk. Zombies are familiar characters in comic books, video games, television and film, but with thousands of people dressing as zombies and taking to the streets, it becomes clear that the kinds of work zombies do in U.S. culture provides insight into how we approach death, try to diffuse its potency, and use it to make political interventions into everyday life. Zombies are critical repositories of social fears and desires related to capitalist wage slavery, race, gender, and the political power of the masses, and as such, they demonstrate how representations and performances of death, in widely different forms, have served remarkably consistent functions in the United States throughout the past two centuries.; This project seeks to show that the zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave and master, both living and dead, both black and white—is often positioned as that which invades the normative space of the living, a space that is generally conceived of in terms of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing those who exist in this space to face a being who can encompasses both their ideals and that which their society rejects, the zombie can be used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo while also undercutting those same ideals—often within the same text.; Chapter one provides a survey of zombie scholarship and describes the history of the figure in U.S. popular culture. Chapter two places zombies in their historical context, considering their ties to Vodou belief and U.S-Haitian relations. Examining travelogues, magazine articles, and official documents about Haiti circulating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the zombie is identified as one in a long line of figures used in debates surrounding dependent territories, self-rule, and the limits of U.S. democracy. Early film zombies thus come to symbolize the paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially liberating imaginative escape from dominant systems. However, this idealistic feature of zombies is restricted by racism in early zombie films.; Chapter three considers how the zombie state in film is marked by race and gender, arguing that while the zombie can be terrifying, it also presents a fantasy of escape from white, heteronormative patriarchy. This fantasy state is often racialized, positioning blackness as more attractive than normative whiteness, and female characters frequently offer a point of identification with it. Many zombie films are therefore sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both promoting and punishing the transgressive and non-normative, often within the same text.; The fourth chapter considers the connection between the spectator’s relationship to images of death in 19th century presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances, to that same relationship in contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain visual technologies can encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness that empowers spectators/players, this chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the context of representations of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to enact desires that show death not as final, but as something that can be transcended, which ultimately robs the zombie of some of its inherent political potential.; The fifth chapter examines Zombie Walks. These events present a contemporary example of death being introduced into the world of the living to unsettle assumptions of how public space should be used. Public performances of zombiness disrupt the normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which “zombies” walk while simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting, ugly corpses. In this way, zombie walkers offer an important example of the contemporary carnivalesque.; The final chapter of this project illustrates that while the zombie can stand as something that is both comforting and threatening, in either guise, it carries with it the potential of another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the aspirations of any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or the abject by their society’s standards. Thus, often, in the form of the zombie, death is not only made attractive in U.S. popular culture, it is made politically useful as well. |
| Keyword | zombies in film; zombie video games; Zombie Walks; voodoo in film; U.S./Haiti relations; race in film; gender in film; phantasmagoria; spiritualist phenomena; zombies and the carnivalesque |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage date | 2001/2010 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3808 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Kee-4414 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume51/etd-Kee-4414.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 17 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 6 which the zombie has been put in U.S. popular culture reveals that the dead have a tremendous amount of political power within the world of the living, and as the zombie shows, that power may support dominant institutions, serve to question them, or both, often within the same text. THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO In 1937 Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits observed, More than any other single term, the word ‘voodoo’ is called to mind whenever mention is made of Haiti… Not only has emphasis been placed on its frenzied rites and the cannibalism supposed on occasion to accompany them, but its dark mysteries of magic and ‘zombis’ have been so stressed that it has become customary to think of the Haitians as living in a universe of psychological terror.10 Herskovits’s quip about the American proclivity to think of Haiti only in terms of “voodoo,” and at that, a voodoo imagined as the harbor of every sort of boogeyman, is a potent reminder that the Haiti of the American imagination is a construct far removed from Haitian reality. At the same time, Herskovits’s comment underlines how Haiti, voodoo, and the zombie, were (and are) interrelated in U.S. popular culture: to many, Haiti was (and is) a land of voodoo, and voodoo is a superstition that produces zombies. Moreover, the zombie, as it entered the United States—both in popular culture and academic works—was intimately tied to Haiti and voodoo, and as I will argue in Chapter !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (1937; reprint, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007), 139. |
