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15
work for another.29 The zombi of the spirit is a little harder to define, but typically, it is a
soul that has been separated from its body. As Ackermann and Gauthier note, “…this
type of zombi is heterogeneous. It may be either an apparently normal soul unaffected by
magic or a soul that has been magically captured and enslaved.”30 The apparently normal
souls they mention may be, for instance, the souls of those who have died in accidents or
who have died before their time. The magically enslaved souls are those that have been
sought out by a houngan, manbo or bokor31 and placed in a bottle, so that the power of
the soul may be directed to work on someone’s behalf.32
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
29 Ackermann and Gauthier point out that zombis of the body are by no means exclusive to Haiti, making
reference to similar creatures in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America (478-9). Also, Katherine
Dunham subdivides zombis of the body as follows: those bodies that have truly died and been resurrected
to work and those that have been drugged so as to appear dead and have been kidnapped to work. She
claims that if the truly dead zombi should ever eat salt, it would fall down dead right there (this is
corroborated in a number of other accounts) and that if the drugged zombi should eat salt, that person
would come back to life “as a normal human being” (Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday & Co, 1969), 184-85).
30 Ackermann and Gauthier, 482.
31 A houngan is a male Vodou priest, a manbo is a female Vodou priest, and bokors are sorcerers.
Typically speaking, houngans and manbos are associated with positive or neutral works and bokors are
associated with more malevolent practices. Zora Neale Hurston is quick to point out that for many, zombis
are typically only the province of bokors—true houngans and manbos would have nothing to do with
creating or enslaving them (Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
(1938; reprint, New York: Harper & Row 1990), 189). Edna Taft also makes this assertion (Edna Taft, A
Puritan in Voodoo-land (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Co, 1938), 257). Alfred Métraux, on the other
hand, makes no differentiation between bokors and houngans, and in fact, associates zombi-making with
houngans (Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (1959; reprint, New York: Schocken
Books, 1972), 281). Finally, Elizabeth McAlister, in her discussion of zombis of the spirit, which she
refers to as zonbi, notes that “Capturing zonbi in order to perform mystical work can be an act of sorcery,
but it is also a practice that can be morally benign” (Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and
Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 105).
32 For discussions of zombis of the spirit, see Bryan Senn, Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema
(Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998), 16; Elizabeth McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle: The Visual Art of
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 26 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 15 work for another.29 The zombi of the spirit is a little harder to define, but typically, it is a soul that has been separated from its body. As Ackermann and Gauthier note, “…this type of zombi is heterogeneous. It may be either an apparently normal soul unaffected by magic or a soul that has been magically captured and enslaved.”30 The apparently normal souls they mention may be, for instance, the souls of those who have died in accidents or who have died before their time. The magically enslaved souls are those that have been sought out by a houngan, manbo or bokor31 and placed in a bottle, so that the power of the soul may be directed to work on someone’s behalf.32 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 Ackermann and Gauthier point out that zombis of the body are by no means exclusive to Haiti, making reference to similar creatures in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America (478-9). Also, Katherine Dunham subdivides zombis of the body as follows: those bodies that have truly died and been resurrected to work and those that have been drugged so as to appear dead and have been kidnapped to work. She claims that if the truly dead zombi should ever eat salt, it would fall down dead right there (this is corroborated in a number of other accounts) and that if the drugged zombi should eat salt, that person would come back to life “as a normal human being” (Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1969), 184-85). 30 Ackermann and Gauthier, 482. 31 A houngan is a male Vodou priest, a manbo is a female Vodou priest, and bokors are sorcerers. Typically speaking, houngans and manbos are associated with positive or neutral works and bokors are associated with more malevolent practices. Zora Neale Hurston is quick to point out that for many, zombis are typically only the province of bokors—true houngans and manbos would have nothing to do with creating or enslaving them (Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938; reprint, New York: Harper & Row 1990), 189). Edna Taft also makes this assertion (Edna Taft, A Puritan in Voodoo-land (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Co, 1938), 257). Alfred Métraux, on the other hand, makes no differentiation between bokors and houngans, and in fact, associates zombi-making with houngans (Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (1959; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 281). Finally, Elizabeth McAlister, in her discussion of zombis of the spirit, which she refers to as zonbi, notes that “Capturing zonbi in order to perform mystical work can be an act of sorcery, but it is also a practice that can be morally benign” (Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 105). 32 For discussions of zombis of the spirit, see Bryan Senn, Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998), 16; Elizabeth McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s Bottle: The Visual Art of |
