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18
films.37 In fact, it was hard to escape the spectacular when discussing zombies, even
though there were numerous attempts to do so.
Several non-fiction accounts of zombis/zombies were published in the immediate
years following the release of The Magic Island. These included Inez Wallace’s 1942
series of articles for The American Weekly, entitled “I Walked with a Zombie,”38 and
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.
In that book, Hurston describes her travels in Haiti in the 1930s and her experiences as a
Vodou initiate.39 Hurston acknowledges: “No one can stay in Haiti long without hearing
Zombies mentioned in one way or another, and the fear of this thing and all that it means
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37 There were, of course, charges that Seabrook’s work itself was highly spectacularized. In his
“Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” Harold Courlander observes of a trip to Haiti: “Down in the
city I had heard a number of times that Seabrook had obtained much of his information at his hotel bar.”
He continues that at the bars, “It was commonplace for some Haitians to say that ‘voodoo’ and witchcraft
really didn’t exist, but before long they would be telling of a personal encounter with a zombie.” Still
Courlander concedes, “…I now believe that though The Magic Island was a personal adventure story
geared to a popular audience, and though its facts often were manipulated for dramatic, eerie effect, in
certain respects it was better researched than some of the books that came in its wake” (Harold Courlander,
“Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” African Arts 23.3 (April 1990), 62).
38 These would become the basis for the 1943 Val Lewton film of the same title; Wallace, like so many
other writers, did not report on first-hand experience, as Seabrook claimed he did, but rather repeated
stories heard on her travels through Haiti. As she remarks, “I believe because I know from indisputable
sources that these things have happened, and are happening today—not many miles from our highly
civilized United States, down in the mysterious magic island of Haiti” (Inez Wallace, “I Walked with a
Zombie” (1942), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986), 96).
39 Although throughout this chapter, I make reference to U.S. popular culture in the singular, there are, of
course, many different popular cultures operating in the United States. Moreover, there is no singular way
to read or react to any of these cultures, and any number of variables—race, age, sexuality, gender,
religious belief, and the like—would play a part in how one read and interacted with popular culture
characters like the zombie. It is outside of the purview of this project, but it should be noted that African-
American and/or African diasporic readings of the zombie, like those produced by Hurston or Katherine
Dunham, may have been colored by their identities as black women and may have significantly differed
from those of other groups writing on zombies.
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 29 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 18 films.37 In fact, it was hard to escape the spectacular when discussing zombies, even though there were numerous attempts to do so. Several non-fiction accounts of zombis/zombies were published in the immediate years following the release of The Magic Island. These included Inez Wallace’s 1942 series of articles for The American Weekly, entitled “I Walked with a Zombie,”38 and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. In that book, Hurston describes her travels in Haiti in the 1930s and her experiences as a Vodou initiate.39 Hurston acknowledges: “No one can stay in Haiti long without hearing Zombies mentioned in one way or another, and the fear of this thing and all that it means !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 37 There were, of course, charges that Seabrook’s work itself was highly spectacularized. In his “Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” Harold Courlander observes of a trip to Haiti: “Down in the city I had heard a number of times that Seabrook had obtained much of his information at his hotel bar.” He continues that at the bars, “It was commonplace for some Haitians to say that ‘voodoo’ and witchcraft really didn’t exist, but before long they would be telling of a personal encounter with a zombie.” Still Courlander concedes, “…I now believe that though The Magic Island was a personal adventure story geared to a popular audience, and though its facts often were manipulated for dramatic, eerie effect, in certain respects it was better researched than some of the books that came in its wake” (Harold Courlander, “Recollections of Haiti in the 1930s and ‘40s,” African Arts 23.3 (April 1990), 62). 38 These would become the basis for the 1943 Val Lewton film of the same title; Wallace, like so many other writers, did not report on first-hand experience, as Seabrook claimed he did, but rather repeated stories heard on her travels through Haiti. As she remarks, “I believe because I know from indisputable sources that these things have happened, and are happening today—not many miles from our highly civilized United States, down in the mysterious magic island of Haiti” (Inez Wallace, “I Walked with a Zombie” (1942), Stories of the Walking Dead, ed. Peter Haining (London: Severn House, 1986), 96). 39 Although throughout this chapter, I make reference to U.S. popular culture in the singular, there are, of course, many different popular cultures operating in the United States. Moreover, there is no singular way to read or react to any of these cultures, and any number of variables—race, age, sexuality, gender, religious belief, and the like—would play a part in how one read and interacted with popular culture characters like the zombie. It is outside of the purview of this project, but it should be noted that African- American and/or African diasporic readings of the zombie, like those produced by Hurston or Katherine Dunham, may have been colored by their identities as black women and may have significantly differed from those of other groups writing on zombies. |
