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grave robbing in what would become one of the most widely read texts on Haiti in the
19th century.39 Many writings on Haitian Vodou picked up on these themes of
cannibalism, often claiming Haitians ate their own children in sacrifice to Vodou gods, as
books and articles either borrowed directly from St. John or built upon his assertions.40
Interestingly, St. John was careful to claim that cannibalism was not endured under the
French, maintaining that it was never mentioned in French colonial accounts of Haiti and
that it would have been difficult to perform when colonial masters kept such a close eye
on their property: one missing slave would have raised suspicions. Of course, inherent in
St. John’s argument was the idea that cannibalism was the result of Haitian self-rule.41
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39 Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (London: McFarland and Co., 2001), 72.
40 Cannibalism has its own chapter in St. John’s text, and he asserts that “every foreigner in Hayti knows
that cannibalism exists” (St. John, 188). Thus, St. John’s argument suffers from a warped a priori
reasoning!because he and the other foreigners know cannibalism exists, it exists. Still, from time to time,
stories of cannibalism tied to Vodou rites would surface in American and European newspapers and
magazines. One such story, related more than a year after the fact in Harper's Weekly in 1865, states that
upon the ascension of Soulouque to power in Haiti, Vodou sects ran wild and that one group “after having
stuffed and devoured one unfortunate child, were about to gormandize upon a second victim when justice
overtook them (“Cannibals in Hayti,” 545).” Using cannibalism to critique the Haitian government, the
article also places Vodou as a threat not only to civilization but to Haiti’s future (ie: its children) as well.
St. John refers to this same instance of supposed cannibalism in his book, particularly in Chapter 5:
“Vaudoux-Worship and Cannibalism” and in Chapter 6: “Cannibalism.” For a discussion that builds upon
St. John’s and then offers its own “proof” of cannibalism, see Frederick A. Ober, In the Wake of Columbus,
Adventures of the Special Commissioner sent by the World’s Columbian Exposition to the West Indies
(Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1893). For a discussion of charges of cannibalism within a Caribbean
context, see Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge,
2003) and for a larger discussion of cannibalism in the colonial world, see Cannibalism and the Colonial
World, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).
41 While St. John’s book and its assertions were widely believed, there were some skeptics. James Froude
in The English in the West Indies, discusses St. John’s book and remarks that while he finds it hard to
believe that someone of St. John’s standing would make up charges of cannibalism and child sacrifice,
“one had to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I
went out to the West Indies I was still unbelieving” (James Anthony Froude, The English in the West
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 97 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 86 grave robbing in what would become one of the most widely read texts on Haiti in the 19th century.39 Many writings on Haitian Vodou picked up on these themes of cannibalism, often claiming Haitians ate their own children in sacrifice to Vodou gods, as books and articles either borrowed directly from St. John or built upon his assertions.40 Interestingly, St. John was careful to claim that cannibalism was not endured under the French, maintaining that it was never mentioned in French colonial accounts of Haiti and that it would have been difficult to perform when colonial masters kept such a close eye on their property: one missing slave would have raised suspicions. Of course, inherent in St. John’s argument was the idea that cannibalism was the result of Haitian self-rule.41 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (London: McFarland and Co., 2001), 72. 40 Cannibalism has its own chapter in St. John’s text, and he asserts that “every foreigner in Hayti knows that cannibalism exists” (St. John, 188). Thus, St. John’s argument suffers from a warped a priori reasoning!because he and the other foreigners know cannibalism exists, it exists. Still, from time to time, stories of cannibalism tied to Vodou rites would surface in American and European newspapers and magazines. One such story, related more than a year after the fact in Harper's Weekly in 1865, states that upon the ascension of Soulouque to power in Haiti, Vodou sects ran wild and that one group “after having stuffed and devoured one unfortunate child, were about to gormandize upon a second victim when justice overtook them (“Cannibals in Hayti,” 545).” Using cannibalism to critique the Haitian government, the article also places Vodou as a threat not only to civilization but to Haiti’s future (ie: its children) as well. St. John refers to this same instance of supposed cannibalism in his book, particularly in Chapter 5: “Vaudoux-Worship and Cannibalism” and in Chapter 6: “Cannibalism.” For a discussion that builds upon St. John’s and then offers its own “proof” of cannibalism, see Frederick A. Ober, In the Wake of Columbus, Adventures of the Special Commissioner sent by the World’s Columbian Exposition to the West Indies (Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1893). For a discussion of charges of cannibalism within a Caribbean context, see Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003) and for a larger discussion of cannibalism in the colonial world, see Cannibalism and the Colonial World, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 41 While St. John’s book and its assertions were widely believed, there were some skeptics. James Froude in The English in the West Indies, discusses St. John’s book and remarks that while he finds it hard to believe that someone of St. John’s standing would make up charges of cannibalism and child sacrifice, “one had to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I went out to the West Indies I was still unbelieving” (James Anthony Froude, The English in the West |
