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20
readings of Vodou in the West.42 The book also, as Michael D. Largey reveals,
“challenged the ways in which culture had been viewed in Haiti until that time.”43 Rather
than assuming that everything of cultural value came from the French, according to
Largey, in Life in a Haitian Valley, Herskovits “assumed the primacy of African culture”
in Haiti.44
This link to Africa would become part of the zombi concept as well.45 Dunham
observes that in one of Herskovits’s later works Dahomey: An Ancient West African
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42 In 1933, Joseph Williams’s Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft was published, and
while Williams’s grasp on Vodou might not have been as complete as many of the scholars that would
follow, his book does provide a rather comprehensive literature review on Vodou for the time, see Joseph J.
Williams, Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft (1933; reprint, Charleston, SC:
BiblioBazaar, 2008); after Herskovits, writers of note on Haiti and Vodou would include James Leyburn,
whose 1941 book The Haitian People does make brief mention of zombis, and Harold Courlander, whose
essays included 1944’s “Gods of the Haitian Mountains” (see James Leyburn, The Haitian People, rev. ed.
(1941; reprint, New Haven: Yale UP, 1966); and Harold Courlander, “Gods of the Haitian Mountains,” The
Journal of Negro History 29.3 (July 1944): 339-372).
43 Michael D. Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 205; see also Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley.
44 Largey, 206. Although the connection between Haiti an Africa might seem rather obvious now, it wasn’t
always so, and while the impact of African cultural beliefs should in no way overshadow other influences
on Haitian belief or how Haiti and Vodou have developed independent of Africa, the relationship between
Haiti and Africa should not be forgotten (especially as it certainly influenced 19th century understandings of
Haitian culture and promoted certain racist assumptions about the new nation). For a discussion of the
African influences on Vodou, see Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun: West African Roots of Vodou,” Sacred
Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
1995): 61-87.
45 Interestingly enough, only one feature zombie film in the United States before 1968’s Night of the Living
Dead was set in Africa—this was 1957’s Zombies of Mora Tau. The pressbook for the film makes several
references to “the voodoo coast of Africa” and “Africa’s Voodoo Waters!” (Zombies of Mora-Tau
Pressbook. Columbia Pictures, 1957. The Cinema-Television Archives, University of Southern California,
1, 3). A significant return of zombies to Africa in the post-1968 years would be the video game Resident
Evil 5 (2009), which takes place in Africa and which is discussed in Chapter Four.
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 31 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 20 readings of Vodou in the West.42 The book also, as Michael D. Largey reveals, “challenged the ways in which culture had been viewed in Haiti until that time.”43 Rather than assuming that everything of cultural value came from the French, according to Largey, in Life in a Haitian Valley, Herskovits “assumed the primacy of African culture” in Haiti.44 This link to Africa would become part of the zombi concept as well.45 Dunham observes that in one of Herskovits’s later works Dahomey: An Ancient West African !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 In 1933, Joseph Williams’s Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft was published, and while Williams’s grasp on Vodou might not have been as complete as many of the scholars that would follow, his book does provide a rather comprehensive literature review on Vodou for the time, see Joseph J. Williams, Voodoos, and Obeahs: Phases of West Indian Witchcraft (1933; reprint, Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2008); after Herskovits, writers of note on Haiti and Vodou would include James Leyburn, whose 1941 book The Haitian People does make brief mention of zombis, and Harold Courlander, whose essays included 1944’s “Gods of the Haitian Mountains” (see James Leyburn, The Haitian People, rev. ed. (1941; reprint, New Haven: Yale UP, 1966); and Harold Courlander, “Gods of the Haitian Mountains,” The Journal of Negro History 29.3 (July 1944): 339-372). 43 Michael D. Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 205; see also Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley. 44 Largey, 206. Although the connection between Haiti an Africa might seem rather obvious now, it wasn’t always so, and while the impact of African cultural beliefs should in no way overshadow other influences on Haitian belief or how Haiti and Vodou have developed independent of Africa, the relationship between Haiti and Africa should not be forgotten (especially as it certainly influenced 19th century understandings of Haitian culture and promoted certain racist assumptions about the new nation). For a discussion of the African influences on Vodou, see Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun: West African Roots of Vodou,” Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995): 61-87. 45 Interestingly enough, only one feature zombie film in the United States before 1968’s Night of the Living Dead was set in Africa—this was 1957’s Zombies of Mora Tau. The pressbook for the film makes several references to “the voodoo coast of Africa” and “Africa’s Voodoo Waters!” (Zombies of Mora-Tau Pressbook. Columbia Pictures, 1957. The Cinema-Television Archives, University of Southern California, 1, 3). A significant return of zombies to Africa in the post-1968 years would be the video game Resident Evil 5 (2009), which takes place in Africa and which is discussed in Chapter Four. |
