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44
READING THE ZOMBIE
In “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Jen Webb and Sam
Byrnand observe, “There are many points of attraction in the zombie character, and in a
period when zombies seem to be permeating popular culture and emerging in scholarly
literature, there are perhaps as many ways of approaching and evaluating zombies as
there are people who approach and evaluate.”101 Meghan Sutherland likewise sees
zombie films as potential allegories for a number of concepts, or as she notes, “a kind of
structural scaffolding that can effectively support endlessly different platforms over
time.”102 During the nearly century-long tenure of zombies in U.S. popular culture, they
have been read in a variety of ways: as political allegories, economic symbols, religious
figures, and subjects of philosophical debates. It seems zombies, as humans deprived of
their humanity either through slavery or through infectious cannibalism, become clean
slates for a host of cultural anxieties.
There is a growing literature on zombie media in academia,103 but most of it
focuses on zombie films and then, either on films before Night of the Living Dead (what I
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
101 Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand, “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Body and
Society 14.2 (2008), accessed on July 21, 2010, Sage Publications Online, 83.
102 Meghan Sutherland, “Rigor/Mortis: The Industrial Life of Style in American Zombie Cinema,”
Framework 48.1 (Spring 2007), 66.
103 There is a much smaller literature on zombie video games and other media; perhaps the best collection
to include some of these is Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc
Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008). Also, in the next few paragraphs, I will attempt to
highlight some of the best, or most noteworthy, academic writing on zombies, but this review of literature
should in no means be taken as exhaustive.
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 55 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 44 READING THE ZOMBIE In “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand observe, “There are many points of attraction in the zombie character, and in a period when zombies seem to be permeating popular culture and emerging in scholarly literature, there are perhaps as many ways of approaching and evaluating zombies as there are people who approach and evaluate.”101 Meghan Sutherland likewise sees zombie films as potential allegories for a number of concepts, or as she notes, “a kind of structural scaffolding that can effectively support endlessly different platforms over time.”102 During the nearly century-long tenure of zombies in U.S. popular culture, they have been read in a variety of ways: as political allegories, economic symbols, religious figures, and subjects of philosophical debates. It seems zombies, as humans deprived of their humanity either through slavery or through infectious cannibalism, become clean slates for a host of cultural anxieties. There is a growing literature on zombie media in academia,103 but most of it focuses on zombie films and then, either on films before Night of the Living Dead (what I !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 101 Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand, “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Body and Society 14.2 (2008), accessed on July 21, 2010, Sage Publications Online, 83. 102 Meghan Sutherland, “Rigor/Mortis: The Industrial Life of Style in American Zombie Cinema,” Framework 48.1 (Spring 2007), 66. 103 There is a much smaller literature on zombie video games and other media; perhaps the best collection to include some of these is Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, eds. Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008). Also, in the next few paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight some of the best, or most noteworthy, academic writing on zombies, but this review of literature should in no means be taken as exhaustive. |
